In 1937, Tananarive Due’s great-uncle Robert Stephens was buried at the Dozier School in Marianna, Florida, beside hundreds of other boys who never returned home.
Not long after Due had lost her mother — civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due — she got a phone call from the Florida State Attorneys’ office informing her that anthropologist Erin Kimmerle was about to try and exhume the remains from the Dozier School. Kimmerle was referring to Due’s great-uncle, which came as a shock; Due had never heard of him.
“This was all such a surprise. I had never had my mother show me that she had an uncle who died at the age of 15 in state incarceration,” said Due. “I don’t know if she knew about him. … I felt like Robert Stephens had disappeared from our family lore.”
This newfound knowledge is what inspired Due to write The Reformatory: A Novel, the 2024 winner of The Chautauqua Prize.
The Chautauqua Prize — which has been awarded annually since 2012 — celebrates a book of fiction or narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and looks to honor an author’s significant contribution to the literary arts. Due will be celebrated and presented with the Prize during a public reading at 5 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
The Reformatory was chosen as this year’s winner from more than 330 nominations from authors, agents and publishers, which was narrowed down to seven finalists. The finalists this year were Chain-Gang All-Stars: A Novel, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, by Patricia Evangelista; Enter Ghost: A Novel, by Isabella Hammad; This Other Eden: A Novel, by Paul Harding; White Cat, Black Dog: Stories, by Kelly Link; Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, by Emily Strasse; and The Reformatory.
The finalists and winner each year are selected by a jury — until this year, that jury was independent and anonymous, but with Kwame Alexander joining Chautauqua staff this year as Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts, he brought a new approach to the Prize process. The jury brought on two guest jurors — Victoria Christopher Murray, who was on-grounds Week One for her Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection The First Ladies, and Phil Klay, who won the 2015 Chautauqua Prize for his collection Redeployment. Institution staff rounded out the jury, including Alexander; Stephine Hunt, manager of literary arts; Jordan Steves, the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education; Sara Toth, lecture associate and editor of The Chautauquan Daily; and Emily Carpenter, the Prize administrator and coordinator of the Department of Education.
Ultimately, said Alexander — whose endowed position as literary arts artistic director is named for Rudell, who inspired and helped establish the Prize — The Reformatory was chosen as winner because of its unique story and ability to bridge the gap between entertainment and education.
“This book was a page turner, and I learned a great deal from it, and that’s something that we strive for here at the literary arts department and Chautauqua in general,” he said. “How do we create art, music, dance, literature that is inspirational and insightful and entertaining and intellectual? I feel like Tananarive Due meets all those.”
The Reformatory is a historical fiction/horror novel set in Jim Crow Florida, centered around Robbie Stephens Jr. as he is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys, a segregated reformatory that exposes him to the horrors of racism and abuse as he tries to find a way out of there before it’s too late. In addition to the Prize, it was named a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, an American Library Association Notable Book, and a New York Times Notable Book.
Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award-winning author, and at the University of California, Los Angeles, she teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror. For Due, a big part of writing the book was to shed light on the pain countless boys endured at the Dozier School — and to give her great-uncle a better ending in fiction than he did in real life.
“I also learned from Erin Kimmerle, after she exhumed the remains, that (Stephens) had such a bad ear infection, that there was evidence of it in his bones,” she said. “I did pay homage to the fact that he had a sore ear. I wanted that earache — I wanted to have echoes of his real story throughout. I did not feel it would be honest, even in fiction, to try to depict a fictionalized version of the Dozier School, without acknowledging how many of those children were beaten bloody.”
When incorporating horror and fictional elements into the story, Due found herself looking at the monstrosity of society, in a historical context, but also hoping her writing would resonate in thinking about problems that linger today. With The Reformatory, she wanted to open a door of perception when it comes to race, and how people can work to address those issues.
“For some people that’s voting, for some people that’s volunteering. … For some people that might be signing or starting petitions in cases of juvenile justice, teachers standing up for their students,” she said. “I’ve just been thrilled to see the audience (for The Reformatory) grow. … I feel very excited to see audiences expanding on my terms as a storyteller … that they have made the choice to expand their worldview and expand the authors that they read. I think that’s good for all of us.”
