Earlier this week, the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA) announced the recipients of its 2020 Author Awards.
The annual Author Awards recognize works that reveal a new understanding of a topic related to New Jersey’s history and culture. NJSAA considers awards in five non-fiction categories: edited works, popular non-fiction, scholarly, reference, and reproduction of primary sources. Winning works must make use of appropriate primary resources and have been published in the previous two calendar years.
This year, NJSAA recognized two works. Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb by Noriko Matsumoto (Rutgers University Press, 2018) won this years Author Award in the scholarly non-fiction category. Matsumoto’s work examines East Asian settlement in New Jersey through the case study of Fort Lee, the suburb with largest concentration of East Asians on the East Coast.
In the non-fiction popular category, NJSAA awarded this year’s award to The Franklin Park Tragedy: A Forgotten Story of Racial Injustice in New Jersey by Brian Armstrong (The History Press, 2019). Armstrong tells the story of the forced expulsion of many African American residents from Franklin Park, a “sundown town.”
Both authors will be discussing their works at a discussion to be held via Zoom on Wednesday, December 9th at 4:15 pm. NJSAA will send out a notice about registering for the event closer to the date.
Congratulations to this year’s winners!