MAAH Stone Finalists

2024 Finalists: $10,000 Prize

Barbara D. Savage is an historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies.  In 2018-19, she was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford where a new thesis prize in black history was named in her honor.

She is the author of three award-winning books:  Merze Tate:  the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale, 2023), Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard, 2009) and Broadcasting Freedom:  Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (UNC, 1996).  She co-edited two essay collections:  Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women and Women (UNC, 2015) and Religion in the African Diaspora (Hopkins, 2006).

Chad L. Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He specializes in African American and modern United States History, the World War I era and African American intellectual history. He is the author of The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World, which was named a best book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Christian Science Monitor. He is also author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition. His essays, op-eds and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He has earned fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. His current work explores the history and meaning of Black Studies.

2023 Finalists: $10,000 Prize

Kerri K. Greenidge is Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. She is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, winner of the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize, among other honors. She lives in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Claude Johnson is an author, historian, and founder of the Black Fives Foundation, a 501(c)3 public charity whose mission is to inspire excellence by teaching, honoring, and preserving the pre-NBA history of African-Americans in basketball.

His work has been featured by NPR, CBS News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Andscape, Fox Sports, the History Channel, ESPN, and NBA TV.

Claude has a BS in civil engineering and economics from Carnegie Mellon and an MS in mechanical engineering from Stanford. During a 20-year career in corporate America, he held management and executive positions at IBM, American Express, NBA Properties, Nike, Phat Farm, and Benetton Sportsystem. 

The former two-term trustee of the Greenwich Public Library left corporate work to become a stay-at-home dad to his three sons, all of whom are now NCAA Division I student-athletes, the oldest two in football and his youngest in basketball.

2022 Finalists: $10,000 Prize

Jarvis R. Givens is an assistant professor of education and African & African American studies at Harvard University. He specializes in the history of education, African American history, and theories of race and power in education. His first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, won the 2022 Book Prize from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, and the 2022 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association. Professor Givens’ second book, School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, will be published in February 2023 by Beacon Press; and he is currently building the Black Teacher Archive, an online portal that will house digitized records documenting the more than one-hundred-year history of "Colored Teachers Associations." Professor Givens is originally from Compton, California, and currently resides in the Roxbury, Massachusetts. 

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Miles is the author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, which won the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction among other prizes. She is also the author of several other acclaimed and prize-winning books, including The Dawn of Detroit, Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose, andTales from the Haunted South. Miles writes about race, culture, history and the environment for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is originally from Ohio and now lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her family.

2021 Finalists: $10,000 Prize

Walter Davis grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and is a member of the Rock Bridge High School Hall of Fame (2006). His prize-winning books, Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley’s Cotton Kingdom (2013), were published by Harvard University Press. His autobiographical essay, “Guns in the Family,” was included the 2019 edition of Best American Essays; it was originally published in the Boston Review, of which Johnson is a contributing editor. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, published in the spring of 2020, was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Prize in Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Prize in History. Johnson is a founding member of the Commonwealth Project, which brings together academics, artists, and activists in an effort to imagine, foster, and support revolutionary social change, beginning in St. Louis.

Dan Royles is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches courses on United States, African American, LGBT, public, and oral history. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: the African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. As part of the research for To Make the Wounded Whole he also launched the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project, which gathers the life stories of African American AIDS activists, and the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of responses to HIV/AIDS in black America. His current projects include a biography of Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, and a historic context study for the National Park Service on violence against people of African descent in the U.S. and its territories from 1500 to the present.

2020 Finalists: $5,000 Prize

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In addition to Race For Profit, Dr. Taylor is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, as well as a series of articles that discuss her work as an activist for Black lives. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Jacobin, among others. Taylor is a widely sought after public speaker and writer. In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians, and as the Charles H. McIlwain University Preceptor at Princeton University from 2018-2021. In addition to winning the 2020 MAAH Stone Book Award Finalist Prize, Race For Profit was also longlisted for the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Tiffany Lethabo King is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her work focuses on several areas, including Black gender and sexuality in the African Diaspora, Black feminisms, Black Studies, Native feminisms, critical geographies and settler colonialism. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies—and Native thought—that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization. Dr. King is also the co-editor of Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism.

2019 Finalists: $2,500 Prize

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Mary Schmidt Campbell is President of Spelman College. Dr. Campbell received a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in Art History from Syracuse University, and a Doctorate in Humanities from Syracuse University. She served as the vice chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities under former President Barack Obama. Dr. Campbell was a major force in the cultural life of New York City. Her career in New York, began at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which, under her leadership, was the first accredited Black fine arts museum in the country. After serving as NY City’s cultural affairs commissioner, she became Dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a position she held for over two decades.  

“One of our greatest scholars and curators of African American art has given one of the greatest art practitioners the intellectual biography he deserves. Mary Schmidt Campbell’s beautifully written and rigorously researched An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden is a gift.” — Leigh Raiford, PhD, Juror

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Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She earned her B.A. from Howard University and her PhD from Columbia University.  Her book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum Black activists. Carter Jackson is also co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, & Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press). Carter Jackson’s essays have been featured in The Washington Post, Atlantic, Transition Magazine, The Conversation, Boston’s NPR Blog Cognoscenti, AAIHS’s Black Perspectives blog, and Quartz, where her article was named one of the top 13 essays of 2014. She has also been interviewed for the New York Times, WBUR, Al Jazeera International, Slate, The Telegraph, CBC, and Radio One. She is currently a Newhouse Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.

“Force and Freedom should be required reading for all if for no other reason than the fact that it makes clear once and for all that enslaved people violently resisted oppression and did not rely solely on moral suasion and networks of escape in the cause of abolition.” — Dana A. Williams, PhD, Juror

2018 Finalists

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Lawrence P. Jackson
Chester B. Himes: A Biography 

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Lawrence P. Jackson is the author of several award-winning books. Chester B. Himes: A Biography was called the definitive biography of  “one of the towering figures of the Black literary tradition” (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). The biography is a finalist in the 2018 Edgar Awards and made the short list for the 2018 PEN Literary Awards, and  the NAACP Award.  It won the ALA Black Caucus award for nonfiction. Professor Jackson earned a PhD in English and American Literature at Stanford University, and has held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the William J. Fulbright program at the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. He began his teaching career at Howard University in 1997 and is now Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University.  

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Jeffrey C. Stewart is a professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History.