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Feature Fri Feb 15 2013

Agate Publishing's "Freeman" Wins BCALA Fiction Award

Pulitzer Prize Winning Columnist for the Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts, Jr., has received no shortage of accolades in his career. Most recently, his book, Freeman, released by Evanston's Agate Publishing in May of 2012, was awarded the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's (BCALA) fiction prize.

"Few novels published in recent years have more important things to say about African-American history than this one," said Agate's founder, Doug Seibold.

The story, published by Agate's Bolden imprint, takes place immediately after the Confederate surrender and President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. Emboldened by the changing tide in the South, Sam Freeman, a runaway slave, sets out to find his wife from whom he was separated 15 years before.

As Sam's journey progresses, his wife, Tilda, is mired in the mess of the broken South, still in the hands of her owner.

According to Howard Frank Mosher of The Washington Post, "'Freeman' is an important addition to the literature of slavery and the Civil War, by a knowledgeable, compassionate and relentlessly truthful writer determined to explore both enslavement in all its malignancy and also what it truly means to be free."

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is the author of the novel Before I Forget, the memoir Becoming Dad, and Forward From This Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009.

Watch him discuss and read from Freeman here:

 
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