Recipients of the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Award will be honored Sept. 3.
Part of the AJC Decatur Book Festival, the Lillian Smith Book Award will be presented at 2:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Decatur Public Library.
The University of Georgia Libraries sponsors the book award, in partnership with the Southern Regional Council, the Georgia Center for the Book and Piedmont College, to honor the late author of the 1944 novel Strange Fruit.
The books being recognized are Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady, a portrait of the friendship between human rights activist Pauli Murray and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Risa Goluboff’s Vagrant Nation, an examination of constitutional changes and their effect on the social reform movements of the 1960s.
Bell-Scott is a University of Georgia professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science. Goluboff is dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history.