Toni Morrison to be awarded Edward MacDowell Medal in New Hampshire
Toni Morrison
Novelist, editor, and professor Toni Morrison will be awarded the 57th Edward MacDowell Medal at a ceremony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on Sunday, the MacDowell Colony said in a statement.
The Edward MacDowell Medal has been given every year since 1960 to an artist who has greatly contributed to American culture, according to the statement. Past winners include Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keefe, and Edward Hopper.
MacDowell Colony Chairman Michael Chabon will present Morrison with the medal at the free event on the colony grounds with Board President Susan Davenport Austin, Executive Director Cheryl Young, and Resident Director David Marcy, according to the statement.
“Toni Morrison is indisputably the greatest living American novelist,” Chabon said in a statement. “… She is the writer we have been most blessed to have among us during our lifetimes. Her face belongs on postage stamps and mountainsides.”
A Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner, Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. She’s received many honorary degrees and literary awards over the course of her career, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Morrison’s novels explore American society through the “lenses of race, sex, and power” with broad themes, detailed characters, and vivid dialogue, the MacDowell Colony said. Her most well-known novels include Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved.
“If any writer could be called our nation’s conscience, that writer would be Toni Morrison,” author Dave Eggers, chair of the Edward MacDowell Medal Selection Panel and founder of the publishing house McSweeney’s, said in a statement.
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