An Alabama native and African-American author has won the University of Alabama’s annual non-fiction writing award for her work on women and black southern writers.
The university released a statement late last week naming Dr. Trudier Harris as this year’s winner of the Clarence E. Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing. Dr. Harris has written or edited more than two dozen books including the award-winning “The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South”.
The Tuscaloosa native has also taught for 36 years. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama, and previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Clarence E. Cason Award is named after the founder of the University of Alabama’s journalism department. Cason’s writing criticized southern race relations at a time when they were most tense.
Ed. note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Dr. Harris was currently teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill. She retired from UNC in 2009 and joined the University of Alabama's English department in 2010. We regret the error.