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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Today, Senate Minority Leader Nickie J. Antonio (D-Lakewood) (pictured), a Lakewood Democrat who's 23rd state legislative district includes 14 of Cleveland.'s 17 wards.  released the following statement regarding the gov. mike deWine's decision to dissolve the Department of Education and replace its responsibilites under his purview, despite a court order blocking the move:

"I am disappointed to see these changes go forward, despite a Franklin County judge extending a temporary hold until noon Wednesday," said Antonio. "The decision to ignore the authority of the court is a dangerous precedent to set at a time when public trust in the institution of government is at an all-time low. Ohio's students and families deserve an organized and effective department and state board. Until the court decides how to proceed, the state should not interfere."

In September, members of the state Board of Education filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the K-12 education overhaul which passed as part of the state operating budget, House Bill 33. This provision of the operating budget was similar to Senate Bill 1, a politically motivated takeover of public education, transferring almost all powers of the democratically elected State Board of Education to the governor and the newly-created Department of Education and Workforce (DEW).

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

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• WASHINGTON, D.C- After weeks of political wranglings and divisiveness among Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Congress passed a stopgap funding bill Saturday evening that averted a looming government shutdown ahead of a midnight deadline.
• President Joe Biden signed the new law into effect late Saturday night, which means the government can stay open through Nov 17 and as the Thanksgiving holiday looms.
• In a statement, the president, who is up for reelection in 2024,  said the bill was “good news for the American people.” “But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place.
• "Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis,” he said.
• The Senate approved the measure after the House abruptly reversed course earlier in the day and passed the bipartisan  deal that could ultimately cost House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his speaker's seat, McCarthy telling reporters so what and that "Americans come first."
• Among a host of other congressional  naysayers relative to the funding legislation, controversial  GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz told CNN Sunday that he'll work hard to remove the Speaker  from his leadership role this  week, an indication that Republicans remain angry over the bipartisan funding bill and that the usual partisan bickering will continue in Congress.
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• The stopgap bill includes natural disaster aid but  funding for Ukraine, a sticking part for many congressional lawmakers , and across partisan lines, did not make the cut. it  is expected to be voted on in coming weeks, sources said Friday.
• Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The recipients of the 8th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and explores diversity are as follows, will receive their awards during a ceremony on Thursday, September 28, 2023 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the campus of  Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The event is free and open to the public.  The Cleveland Foundation, an annual partner relative to  he distinguished award ceremony, released the list of award winners earlier this year, and they are as follows:

• Geraldine Brooks, “Horse,” Fiction (Viking)
• Lan Samantha Chang, “The Family Chao,” Fiction (W.W. Norton)
• Matthew F. Delmont, “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad,” Nonfiction (Viking)
• Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lifetime Achievement
• Saeed Jones, “Alive at the End of the World,” Poetry (Coffee House Press)

For additional information, a complete list of the recipients since 1935, and to learn more about The Asterisk* podcast featuring previous winners, visit www.Anisfield-Wolf.org.

"These remarkable books deliver groundbreaking insights on race and diversity,” said Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (pictured), who chairs the jury and is a Black scholar and Harvard University researcher who serves as the annual host of the event. “This year, we honor a profound and funny novel centered in a Chinese restaurant, a brilliant story of 19th-century horse-racing with contemporary echoes, a stunning poetry collection that captures who we are now, and a meticulous history that recasts our understanding of World War II. All are capped by the lifetime achievement of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who remade this country with her courage and her nuanced reporting.”

Dr. Gates directs the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, where he is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. Joining him in selecting the winners each year are poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker and historian Simon Schama.

Karen R. Long, manager of the book awards at the Cleveland Foundation, noted the prescience of philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf in founding the prize in 1935.

“Her notion that literature can ignite justice is valid nearly 90 years later, and we are honored to add the 2023 winners to the canon,” Long said. "We are proud the newest books tackle the toughest topics and insist on ways forward.”

Past winners include seven writers who later won Nobel prizes – Ralph J. Bunche, Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Gunnar Myrdal, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott. They are among the 262 recipients of the prize.

About the 2023 Winners

Geraldine Brooks, 67, crafted her ninth book, “Horse” to imagine the relationship between Lexington, a legendary antebellum American racehorse, and his Black groom, Jarret, as the stallion rises to greatness. The novel toggles between the 1850s, the 1950s and 2019, where a pair of young D.C. intellectuals are caught up in the horse’s story through art and science. What resulted, according to Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., is “a dazzling achievement, a brilliant example of how to turn historical events into a fiction that stands on its own.” Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for “March.” A native of Australia, she graduated from the University of Sydney before working as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. Brooks went on to earn her master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and worked as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016.

Lan Samantha Chang, 58, crafted “The Family Chao” – which earned a spot on Barack Obama’s 2022 summer reading list – as a comedic retelling of Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” through the lens of a dysfunctional Chinese-American family. They own a restaurant in small-town Wisconsin until the patriarch is murdered and others rush to impose a sinister twist on their American dream. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Joyce Carol Oates extolled the novel as “an outstanding work of fiction”’ that she found to be exceptionally accomplished and ambitious. Chang has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 17 years. She graduated from Yale University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She herself is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. The American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation all granted her fellowships. Earlier books include “All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost” and “Hunger.” She lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa.

Matthew F. Delmont, 45, is a historian whose “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad” explores the vital contributions that Black men and women made to the United States’ victorious effort in World War II, only to return home to find segregation and racism athwart their schools, communities and jobs. “The role of African Americans in World War II rewrites our understanding of ‘the greatest generation’ in the ‘good war,’ given the shocking discrimination and harassment of millions of patriots willing to risk their lives in it,” Anisfield-Wolf Juror Steven Pinker notes. “The tension between the America-vs.-Fascism clash and the White-America-vs.-Black-America clash highlights the way in which humans belong to multiple overlapping coalitions, and how a recognition of these contradictions can lead to moral and historical shifts.” Delmont received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his master’s and doctorate in American studies from Brown University. He is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He lives in Etna, New Hampshire with his family.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, 81, made history and chronicled it as a journalist, author and lecturer. Alongside her high school classmate, Hamilton Holmes, she desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961 amid taunts, tear gas, vandalism and a riot. She graduated in 1963, embarking on a storied career in journalism that began at The New Yorker. She was the first Black writer for “Talk of the Town.” The assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. interrupted a brief stint in graduate school and led Hunter-Gault to join the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She then went on to The New York Times – establishing the paper’s Harlem bureau – and then PBS, where she won numerous Emmy and Peabody awards. Hunter-Gault became NPR’s chief correspondent in Africa and then CNN’s Johannesburg bureau chief from 1999-2005. The following year, she published the book “New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance.” A Peabody citation declared that she “demonstrated a talent for ennobling her subjects, and revealed a depth of understanding of the African experience that was unrivaled in Western media.” Hunter-Gault, mother of daughter Suesan Stovall and son Chuma Gault, currently lives in Sarasota, Florida with her husband, Ronald Gault.

Saeed Jones, 37, is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and writer whose first collection of poetry, “Prelude to Bruise,” was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2019 memoir, “How We Fight for Our Lives,” won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. “Alive at the End of the World,” Jones’ second collection, contains 46 poems that sweep from strict verse to prose paragraphs. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Rita Dove calls the book “an aching reminder that a queer Black man leads a meta existence; he cannot live without thinking about living, constantly negotiating the everyday with an eye to the peril that can intrude at any time, from police violence to the minutest reactions from highbrow bigots.” Jones, who moved from New York City to Columbus, Ohio in 2019, received his bachelor’s from Western Kentucky University and his master’s from Rutgers University-Newark. He was the founding LGBTQ editor and the executive culture editor at BuzzFeed.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

• 10:00 a.m. Monday, September 25 at Punderson Manor in NE Ohio
• 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, September 26 in the Senate Finance Hearing Room at the Ohio Statehouse