Silver City, NM – Western New Mexico University's Writer-in-Residence's novel, "Damnificados," won another major award recently. Author J.J. Amaworo Wilson accepted the 2017 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction in Washington, DC, last week.

"The Hurston/Wright is particularly special to me because it's an international award for the Black diaspora. The organization promotes both literature and social justice—two elements close to my heart," Wilson said.

Judges applauded "Damnificados" for a "fabulist and gritty dystopia that is nearly allegorical in its portrayal of the dispossessed," according to an article in the Washington Post.

Introduced in 2001, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award honors the best in Black literature in the United States and around the globe. Fiction, nonfiction and poetry honorees are selected in a juried competition. Other 2017 nominees in the Debut Fiction category included "Blackass" by A Igoni Barrett and "Born on a Tuesday" by Elnathan John.

This award is the third for "Damnificados," which won the New Mexico-Arizona Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Fiction Award. The novel made Oprah's Top 10 list and was also nominated for an American Book Award.

"This was definitely the biggest accolade, and I am grateful for, and humbled by, the recognition," Wilson said.

At the 2017 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award Ceremony in Washington, DC., Wilson met Congressman John Lewis, a long-time civil rights activist, who marched with Martin Luther King and has spent his life working for social justice. "Even at seventy-seven, there's fire in his belly, and it was a privilege to spend time with a great man," Wilson said.

He met "the charming and super-smart" Ibram X Kendi, who author of "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas," and reconnected with the National Book Award-winning novelist Jacqueline Woodson, whom he'd met at the Brooklyn Book Festival last year. "It was great to hang out with her again," he said.

"Unfortunately, Colson Whitehead and Zadie Smith, two novelists whose works I admire, didn't make the ceremony, but we weren't short of good company," Wilson said.