The Advisory Committee for the Paul Monette / Roger Horwitz Trust announces its awards for the year 2003. The awards go to innovators in providing services to the LGBT community and to groundbreakers in research about and for that community, in the areas of African Americans and Native Americans and in visual representations.
The Monette / Horwitz Trust $7000 Distinguished Achievement Award for 2003 goes to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Washington, D.C.
Distinguished Achievement Awards of $2000 each go to scholars, teachers, and writers Jennifer DeVere Brody, Chicag; Dwight A. McBride, Chicago; Will Roscoe, San Francisco; and James M. Saslow, New York City.
Jennifer DeVere Brody is associate professor of English, Northwestern University, Evanston, and was, in the 1980s, an early writer in the then nascent field of Black gay and lesbian studies, along with Dwight McBride, also a Monette / Horwitz award winner this year.
Brody has written on Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel Passing and with McBride edited a special issue of the Black Studies journal Callalloo. She is the author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture ( Duke, 1998 ) and is currently working on The Style of Elements: Politically
Performing Punctuation, for which she cites Paul Monette as one inspiration, noting 'the project is indebeted to Monette's elegant essay, '3275' [ from Last Watch of the Night ] where he exclaims, 'Exquisite, that use of 'grave' for 'engrave' as if the action of the stone cutter and the place itself are one.' The Monette / Horwitz Trust awards Brody $2,000.
Dwight A. McBride is associate professor of English, Northwestern University, and currently serves as chair of the African American Studies Dept. and was, in the 1980s, an early writer in the then nascent field of Black gay and lesbian studies. McBride has written Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony ( NYU Press, 2001 ) .
McBride favors the cross-disciplinary and transatlantic approach characteristic of American Studies, African American Studies, and especially cultural studies and with Brody edited a special issue of Callalloo. His current project is titled Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in America. The Monette / Horwitz Trust awards McBride $2,000.
The awards will be formally presented at the Lambda Literary Awards banquet in Los Angeles May 29.
