Alyssa Cole, Essie Chambers, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson are among the authors nominated for the NAACP Image Awards, which honor outstanding achievements in the arts by people of color.
Cole was nominated in the fiction category for her thriller One of Us Knows, alongside Tia Williams for A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, Sarai Johnson for Grown Women, Wanda M. Morris for What You Leave Behind, and the late Diane Oliver for Neighbors and Other Stories.
Chambers made the debut author shortlist for her Barnes & Noble Discover Prize–winning Swift River, along with Uche Okonkwo for A Kind of Madness, Shirley Neal for AfroCentric Style: A Celebration of Blackness & Identity in Pop Culture, Johnson for Grown Women, and O.O. Sangoyomi for Masquerade.
Jackson was nominated in the biography/autobiography category for Lovely One, as were Whoopi Goldberg for Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me; Cheslie Kryst and April Simpkins for By the Time You Read This: The Space Between Cheslie’s Smile and Mental Illness―Her Story in Her Own Words; Tasha Cobbs Leonard for Do It Anyway: Don’t Give Up Before It Gets Good; and Joy-Ann Reid for Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America.
The winners of the NAACP Image Awards will be announced on Feb. 21 and 22. A full list of nominees is available at the Hollywood Reporter website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
