Leon Forrest Prose Awards this week!

Leon Forrest was a Chicago author of fiction and essays, whose long career as a writer was celebrated not only in Chicago, but with national renown.  His work is dense, and rich with the vibrancy and darkness of Chicago, and as Henry Louis Gates called Forrest’s Divine Days “The War and Peace of African-American Literature.”

Conducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014, they say of Forrest, “His stream-of-consciousness writing concerned the legacy of slavery and earned him a place on Chicago magazine’s “Most Important Chicagoans of the 20th Century.” His novels are set in a mythical Forrest County that closely resembles Chicago. His third novel, “Two Wings to Veil My Face” (1984), won the Society of Midland Authors Award for adult fiction, the DuSable Museum Certificate of Merit and Achievement in Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award and the Friends of Literature Prize. His fourth book, “Divine Days” (1992), won the Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award for local fiction.

Forrest served as president of the Society of Midland Authors, as well as wrote for numerous South Side Chicago newspapers during his long literary career. He was a professor at Northwestern University serving there from 1973 until his death in 2001, and was the head of the African American Studies Department from 1985-1994.  His work still carries with it the weight of a great writer whose gifts are not diminished, but rather extended with time.