Award inspires community involvement
In addition to the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s international reach, it blankets the local community as well.
Book clubs throughout the region have come to rely on the list of winners when it’s time to select their books; libraries and universities plan courses and programs around it. Wright State’s related programming included a photography exhibition, concert and weekend literary conference featuring the award-winning authors. A series of talks at Wright Library this year were led by Andrew Slade, chair of the English department at the University of Dayton.
Mary Ann Gasior, who taught at Wright State, has been teaching a class entitled "The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winners" in recent years for UD's Lifelong Learning Institute. It will be repeated again in January.
“The first time I taught it I had 16 students, last year we had 30,” said Gasior, who is also a first reader for the prize and had attended many of the conversations with the authors held the weekend of the event. Her course for seniors covers each year’s winners and runners-up.
A question that comes up every time she teaches the class: why are so many of these books so grim and about war? Gasior believes it’s the idea that we need to do something to stop the horror. “When Tim O’Brien made his acceptance speech, he said he had always been considered a war writer and that this award meant more to him than others because it celebrated peace,” Gasior said.
The Woman's Literary Club in Dayton was organized in 1889 and is still going strong. This year's papers, presented by active members at each meeting, is focusing on the Dayton Literary Peace Prize winners. The season kicked off with Rab as special guest.
“Sharon had a fabulous slide presentation of most of the winners from the last 10 years and she told us how the whole event came about,” said member Anne Johnson. “She wove in fabulous details about the authors and priceless information that only she would know. She inspired us that this could happen in Dayton. We came away thinking that this is no ordinary city and she is no ordinary woman.”
Johnson said she came away marveling at how the event got to this stage without “a heap of corporate sponsors.”
“She gets most of the money from ordinary attendees,” Johnson said. “Dayton knows this is something extraordinary and well worth the money. I personally feel happy that my ticket cost helped to provide some wonderful writer with his or her cash prize.”
Thanks to Sherry and Hans Tschudin of Washington Twp., young people are always present at the gala event.
"We always buy a table in support of the event and invited friends the first year," said Mrs. Tschudin. "The second year my husband said our friends could afford to buy their own tickets and suggested we invite students." So the couple began inviting students from the University of Dayton and the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA.)
“I think we wanted the students to have a sense of how proud we were to be Daytonians,” she said. “This was beginning to get world recognition and while it has been an important city for manufacturing in the past, now it is known for a literary peace prize. We wanted young people to know there was so much more to be proud of about Dayton.”
The couple’s invitation also includes a get-together with the students before the weekend, an invitation to the Saturday night party, and a shopping trip if they need anything to wear to the dressy event.
“We’ve had students tell us it changed their lives,” said Mrs. Tschudin. “Some saw themselves as writers and this gave them the encouragement they needed.”
When Sharon Rab first dreamed up the idea of a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, she had a feeling it would turn out to be a success. She did not foresee how successful it was destined to become.
Tonight, onstage at the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center, the annual event that has put Dayton on the literary map will mark its 10th year. In the past decade, 54 authors of fiction and non-fiction have accepted the prestigious award and the list of those submitting nominations has grown to include dozens of publishers throughout the world.
Tonight’s honorees
At this evening’s sold-out event author/activist Gloria Steinem will receive the 2015 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. It will be presented by legendary television personality Phil Donahue, whose daytime talk show got its start in Dayton.
“Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson is this year’s non-fiction winner; “The Great Glass Sea,” by Josh Weil is the 2015 fiction award winner. Runners up are “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” by Jeff Hobbs for non-fiction and “All the Light They Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr for fiction.
In addition to their honorariums — $10,000 to winners and $1,000 to runners-up — the recipients will receive a sculpture created by local artist Michael Bashaw. The two-foot tall brass piece incorporates symbolic tools of the writer’s trade — the word, the page and the pen — and includes the word for “peace” in more than 300 languages.
Weil said he’d heard about the Dayton prize because it is rapidly becoming high on people’s lists and really means something in the literary community. His novel revolves around twin brothers who work in the world’s largest greenhouse and whose billionaire employer turns then into pawns for opposing ideologies. He said his book is about how people choose to live their lives in ways that are harmful to themselves and the people they love.
“I took a lot of risks with this novel and it took me five years to write it,” he said. “It scared me to write it, and when it was out in the world it was hard for me to come to peace with what the book was and not doubt it. This prize gave me that ease and acceptance and a sense that the book had been worth the years I put into it. So it means a lot to me.”
Weil said the Dayton prize encourages him to take risks with his next project. “It’s hugely valuable from a creative standpoint,” he said. “I have a boy and a wife who needs my help with him and I have to carve out the time for writing. It’s hard to justify that sometimes. This award is a reminder of the import that literature can have and that this thing that can seem so selfish and inward looking, once it’s out in the world, can have the impact that justifies the focus that it takes.”
Weil said he hopes his novel will help people look at their own lives through the prism of his very different world and see the choices they’ve made and will make with greater clarity. “And that in the end it leads to a greater sense of peace personally for readers.”
Stevenson’s narrative is a probe into our country’s criminal justice system based on his own experiences as a lawyer. His great-grandparents were enslaved in Virginia. The Dayton prize, he said, is at the heart of why he wanted to write his book. “It’s important that the work I do as an author reflects my broader ambitions to create more justice and peace,” he explained. “I consider myself someone actively trying to protect human rights, create greater justice, confront inequality and abuse of power. So to receive an award that honors an author’s work consistent with goals of peace is especially gratifying to me.”
Mercy, he said, is the way we make our justice just. “Without a recognition of people’s capacity to make mistakes and fall down, we are at risk of doing things that are abusive, cruel and oppressive,” he said. “Every one of us makes mistakes and when we make a mistake we want to be forgiven. You give mercy to people because it is what justice and compassion require.”
“I hope people who read my book will be more committed to reforming our system,” Stevenson said. “We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. If they saw what I see, knew what I knew, they too would want reform.”
A literary family
What has surprised and delighted Rab over the years is the way in which the authors have connected and become a family. “So many of them actually use that word, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize family,” she said. “They have fallen in love with our city and the prize and they feel a connection to us that is very special.”
One of those who echoes that sentiment is Gilbert King, Nonfiction Runner-Up in 2013 for his book, “Devil in the Grove.” He is returning to Dayton for the third time this weekend. “There is something very special about the Dayton Literary Peace Prize that’s beyond literature,” he said. “Everyone I talk to says the same thing: it’s one of the great weekends for writers. It’s beyond a writing award; it’s the mission of furthering peace through literature that a lot of writers feel a commitment to.”
It has become a tradition for previous winners to present the awards. “You do feel like the people in Dayton have become a family, you feel this tremendous support and appreciation,” King said. “A lot of times we go on the road to bookstores and we’re competing with other events in the city. But in Dayton, hundreds of people come out to celebrate literature. I don’t see this anywhere else. It hits you how important it is for these writers to be recognized for the topics they are writing about.”
Rab believes the authors’ reactions say a lot about the people of Dayton. “They recognize the warmth with which they are greeted and embraced,” she said. “They know the community is part of this award.”
Looking back
Rab, the founder and co-chair of the international award, is a former English and composition teacher who served on the board which created the Dayton Peace Prize to recognize individuals who contributed to the 1995 Dayton Peace accords negotiations.
When her research revealed there was no other national literary peace prize in America, Rab proposed the honor as a natural for Dayton.
“That first year, when I called the winners to say ‘congratulations,’ you could hear the silence on the other end of the phone,” Rab recalls. “I don’t have that now. Now I hear delight, joy, excitement. They know who we are and what we stand for.”
Over the course of the special weekend the authors mix with more than 1,000 people. There’s a Saturday night reception for patrons and their guests, a Sunday morning panel discussion open to the public, and the main event on Sunday night where patrons gather in the Wintergarten for a reception, then take their places at tables on the Mead Theatre stage for an elegant dinner and inspiring program. “We determined that Dayton is known for the arts and it was time for literary arts to take the stage in Dayton,” Rab explained. “Being on the stage is perfect because even though there are 400 people, no one is more than 40 feet away from the speakers and it’s an intimate event.”
Rab said she has always been delighted by words and word play, and is appreciative of the opportunity books give her to be inside somebody else’s head for a while and to experience the world vicariously but intimately. The idea for the Literary Peace Prize, she said, came to her when she hosted a cable television show, “Writer to Writer” where she interviewed writers from all over the country.
“They all remarked upon what a marvelous community Dayton was because it was a community of readers,” she said. “They knew if they came here, audiences had read their books and were eager to ask questions. Coupled with the way I’d seen literature open my students’ minds and hearts to new ideas, I realized literature could change people’s lives. The peace prize was a perfect fit for Dayton.”
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