The Zora Awards — Hurston/Wright Foundation

The prize changed its name and raised its money in the same year, which is the rarer half of that pair. The Hurston/Wright Foundation has renamed its genre awards for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and debut fiction as The Zoras, in tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, and an anonymous donation has put $20,000 behind the debut fiction win. Finalists were announced in Washington on August 14; the 25th annual Legacy Awards gala runs October 9 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Introduced in 2001, this was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers, and it has stayed under that ownership for a quarter century. Naming a debut prize is cheap. Funding one at twenty thousand is the part that changes a writer's year. The room agreeing here is the point rather than the problem.