Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony

The Decatur Book Festival is proud to celebrate the 2026 winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award. The Lillian Smith Book Awards recognize works that examine issues of race, social justice, civil and human rights, the education and socialization of young people, breaking silence among repressed groups, and matters that are significant to the changing South. This award ceremony is in partnership with the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, and DeKalb County Public Library’s Georgia Center for the Book. 

The 2026 winners are Derek W. Black and Keisha N. Blain. Black’s Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy shows how literacy evolved from a subversive gateway to freedom in the nineteenth century to a public program to extend citizenship and build democratic institutions. Blain’s Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights is a necessary and bracing history of Black women’s critical role over the past two centuries in defining the concept of human rights.

This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required, and seating is first come, first served. Signing information: Signing time: 12:30 PM

Signing location: Decatur Library Meeting Room

About the Authors

Derek W. Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina. His new book is Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy.

Keisha N. Blain is a professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow; an author, most recently of Without Fear and Until I Am Free; and coeditor of the bestselling Four Hundred Souls. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights is her new book.