About the 2022 Award Recipient – Wade Hudson
Wade Hudson, author of Defiant: Growing Up in the Jim Crow South, founded Just Us Books in 1988 with Cheryl Willis Hudson. Wade serves as president and CEO of the company. His career as a writer spans more than three decades and has resulted in more than 25 published books for children and young adults. They include Book of Black Heroes from A to Z, Jamal's Busy Day, Pass It On: African American Poetry for Children, Powerful Words: Two Years of Outstanding Writing by African Americans, the Great Black Heroes series, The Underground Railroad and The Two Tyrones.
Wade serves on a number of community boards and is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Pen America. He speaks around the country about issues of inclusion, empowering Black boys to succeed through literacy and other topics. He has received numerous honors for his contributions to children's literature, including the Stephen Crane Literary Award, induction into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, the Harlem Book Fair Phyllis Wheatley Award (2007), the Ida B. Wells Institutional Leadership Award (2008) presented by the Center for Black Literature and the Madame C. J. Walker Legacy Award (2012) given by the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Foundation. He is co-editor with his wife of the anthologies, We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, The Talk, Conversations About Race, Love & Truth and Recognize: An Anthology Honoring and Amplifying Black Life. Kirkus Reviews called his recent coming-of-age memoir, Defiant, Growing up in the Jim Crow South a “powerful testimony from a children’s literature legend.”