Stefaniak’s “The Cailiffs of Baghdad Georgia” Wins Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad Georgia has won a 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. The Anisfield-Wolf Awards are given to authors whose work “addresses the complex issues of race and cultural diversity,” according Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, who serves as jury chair. The judges for this year’s prize were Rita Dove and Joyce Carol Oates.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners will be honored in a ceremony in Cleveland on September 15, 2011. The Awards have been given annually by The Cleveland Foundation for 76 years. According to the press release, Cleveland Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Ronald B. Richard said of the award’s creator: “Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf created this book prize more than 75 years ago because of her conviction that the issue of race was the most critical dilemma facing the United States. It was her fervent desire to break down stereotypes and encourage civil discourse so that future generations would be more appreciative of human diversity.”

The Cailiffs of Baghdad Georgia (W.W. Norton & Co, 2010) is told by an 11-year old narrator, Gladys. She presents the reader with the controversies of a rural, Georgia town in the 1930s, and the changes that the people of the town undergo when they are woo-ed, inspired and challenged by a teacher who is a feminist and an outsider. The novel explores issues of race, national identity, cultural stereotypes, challenges of social order and how story-telling alters the historical narrative.

For Her Circle Ezine’s 2011 International Women’s Day celebration, Mary Helen Stefaniak discusses her novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad Georgia in an UpClose Interview.

Mary Helen Stefaniak’s second novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W. W. Norton & Company), was chosen by independent booksellers as an Indie-Next “Great Read” for September 2010. Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W. W. Norton), won the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Book Award and has been translated into several languages. Her fiction has appeared in many publications, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, where “A Note to Biographers Regarding Famous Author Flannery O’Connor” appeared in 2000. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including The Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, and A Different Plain (University of Nebraska Press). Her first book, Self Storage and Other Stories, received the Wisconsin Library Association’s 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. A former commentator on Iowa Public Radio and contributing editor for The Iowa Review, she has taught in M.F.A. programs at Pacific University in Oregon and at the University of Nebraska, and she currently serves as a contributing editor for Cerise Press, an international journal of literature, arts & culture. She divides her time between Iowa City and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. To learn more, visit her website, http://www.maryhelenstefaniak.com/. (Or travel to www.baghdadbazaarGA.com.)