This month Word Warrior was selected as a finalist in the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Awards. These awards were created in honor of the first published African American poet/writer by QBR, The Black Books Review – “the African American book review of record,” according to cultural critic Martin Arnold of the New York Times.
Phyllis Wheatley was brought to America as an enslaved 
African from the Gambia, West Africa in 1770. She was seven or eight years old. Wheatley soon learned how to read and write, and published her first poem at age 12. She went on to publish several poems that made her famous in early 1770s, and by 1775 Wheatley became the first enslaved African in America to publish a book.
How fitting that Word Warrior, a book about a man who loved poetry and who was a lyrical poet and powerful writer, would earn finalist status in the Wheatley Awards category that celebrates an author’s first nonfiction book!
Please click here to see the other finalists in this and the other Wheatley Awards categories. And thanks for your support!