The Townsend Prize, presented by the Georgia Writers Museum (GWM) and the Atlanta Writers Club, is the most prestigious award for literary fiction given to a Georgia author.
Started in 1981 and named for Jim Townsend, founder and long-time editor of Atlanta magazine, the celebrated prize is awarded every other year. Previous winners have included Alice Walker, Terry Kay, and former Georgia poet laureate, Judson Mitchum.
This year’s gala award ceremony was held on April 16 at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta. Ten finalists were chosen by a committee of literary judges from over 50 books nominated. The books of these 10 authors were sent to three out-of-state judges who selected the final winner.
Among this year’s finalists were five authors who are professors of English at Georgia universities. One finalist is a previous winner of the Townsend Prize, while another has had several books on the New York Times Bestseller list.
More than 150 people, including most of GWM’s board members, attended the formal event, where they enjoyed a cocktail gathering and a gourmet dinner in a luxuriously decorated ballroom.
“It was the Academy Award gala event for the literary world in Georgia,” GWM Executive Director Melissa Swindell said.
Attendees were treated to a red-carpet entrance and a champagne toast, with a photographer on hand to snap photos as elegant as movie stars in Hollywood at the Oscars.
“It was a ballroom full of the Who’s Who of the literary world of Georgia, all there to celebrate the best of the best in literary fiction,” GWM President Lou Benjamin observed.
The winning book was One Blood by Denene Millner. Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women’s equality in the early 2000s, Millner’s beautifully wrought novel explores the intimate, often complicated struggles of three women with what it truly means to be a family.
Millner is a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning journalist whose captivating books, columns, and essays have established her presence in the entertainment, book publishing, and social media worlds.
A veteran author who has written and collaborated on 31 critically acclaimed and bestselling books, she is best known for co-authoring Steve Harvey’s two #1 New York Times bestsellers: Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man and Straight Talk, No Chaser. Both books became hit feature films.
In 2019, Millner penned Fresh Princess, a children’s picture book written with Will Smith. She is the creator and director of Denene Millner Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and MyBrownBaby.com, a critically acclaimed blog that examines the intersection of parenting and race.
The Townsend Prize committee is already at work on the 2027 Award ceremony.