If he were still with us, this year the writer and activist James Baldwin would be 100 years old. Rarely does anyone’s legacy age so well. Decades after his death, his work still has a precision and intimacy that all but summon him, his humor, his passion, and intellect into the room. It is why filmmaker Raoul Peck could make an Oscar-nominated documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro” (2017), using Baldwin’s words. After “Moonlight” (2016) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, director Barry Jenkins could have done just about anything. But he used that cachet to adapt Baldwin’s novel “If Beale Street Could Talk.” 

Baldwin still talks to us—in print, on film, his face and quotes on t-shirts and posters—about how to be humane and how to come to terms with how much we need one another. He is saintly. I was once gifted a candle with his image, a yellow-orange sun burning around his head, from the Unemployed Philosopher Guild’s Secular Saint Candle line. People don’t just want to read him but in challenging times wish that they—and others—could emulate Baldwin. That impetus inspired, for example, “Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own” (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., 2020).

Baldwin is passion without sentimentality. Intellectual clarity without cruelty. Love that embraces the full ugly-beautiful breadth of human experience. He speaks to people and the practices and institutions we create that can destroy us. He was Black and queer when both things could be even deadlier than they are today. And he gave voice to all of it. 

How do we honor such a figure? 

Baldwin calls us to listen to, confront, and comfort the broken places within us and help others to do the same. It is interior, deeply personal work that shows up in how we show up, that changes everything with which we come into contact, and whose greatest proof is in how we interact. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke from a mountaintop. He had to shock an entire nation and its guilty, dead forefathers into action. Baldwin is eloquent but always conversational, personal, his essays the finest letters one could ever receive for an audience of exactly one person: you. To read him is to undergo open-heart surgery one paragraph at a time.

Here are ideas for honoring James Baldwin this year.

Read something by Baldwin and share it.

I especially love his “Collected Essays,” edited by Toni Morrison. Open to any page. You can’t go wrong.

Have a Baldwinesque conversation with someone you love—or with a total stranger.

The Baldwin Prize is a scholarship and essay competition that asks high school students to listen and reflect the way Baldwin did. But you don’t have to participate in the competition to have an eye-opening exchange. Use this year’s Baldwin Prize prompt to spark a deeper conversation with someone you love, admire, or just want to get to know better.

Ask your elected officials to pass a proclamation in Baldwin’s honor.

Sample language for such a proclamation is here and below. You can find your US elected officials at every level of government here. 

We hereby recognize 2024 as the James Baldwin Centennial in honor of James Arthur Baldwin, American writer and civil rights advocate born on August 2, 1924. We honor Baldwin, who in his work and in his life asked America and its people to live out their finest ideals. We honor Baldwin because he helped Black people, queer people, the marginalized, the ignored, the lonely, those who needed to be seen and see in that reflection love: He helped everyone. We honor Baldwin because there are few better examples of citizenship, of neighborliness, of humanity demanding and inspiring full expression. We are better because of his example.

Ask the organizations with which you are affiliated to share a statement honoring Baldwin, e.g., on their website or social media.

They can also start with the language above and add to or modify it as needed. Suggestions are here.

And spread the word using the hashtag #BaldwinCentennial. 

2024 will be a busy, cacophonous year. Reflecting on Baldwin can help.
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Photo credit: Allan Warren. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Baldwin Prize is an essay competition at Baltimore City College High School. Named after the writer and humanitarian James Baldwin, the Prize gives City College students an opportunity, during a pivotal stage of their development, to use the written word to explore their inner lives and how it connects with our shared humanity. In 2024, students will earn more than $3,000 in awards.

We are set to have 400 student writers this year, so we need your help. There are two volunteer opportunities. You can register here and read more details below.

1. Read and score essays

Readers (AKA judges) just need a willingness to read student writing and a bit of time. Each judge will be given no more than 6 essays on Saturday, March 30, 2024 and asked to submit scores (according to a rubric that will be provided) by Monday, April 8, 2024.

If you're curious, you'll find this year's prompt here. It's about some of the influences that have had a deep impact on how we think or feel. 
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2. Be a writing consultant

Writing consultants should have some experience writing or editing work for publication. The type of publication and amount of writing or editing experience is not important. Writing consultants just need to be able to listen to students talk about the progress they've made on the current draft of their story and lead a group conversation (consisting of up to three students and one consultant) on things each young writer may want to consider as he or she revises the piece ahead of the submission deadline. Consultations will take place on Friday, February 22 and 23, 2024 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. You can volunteer for as little as one hour online (via Zoom) or in person (at Baltimore City College High School).

To volunteer, please complete this short form.

More information about the Baldwin Prize:

- Learn all about the Prize and what students say about it in this short video.

- The Baldwin Prize blog has pictures and information from previous events as well as winning student essays.

​- And we have a newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The Baldwin Prize is an essay competition at Baltimore City College High School. Named after the writer and humanitarian James Baldwin, the Prize gives City College students an opportunity, during a pivotal stage of their development, to use the written word to explore their inner lives and how it connects with our shared humanity. In 2023, students will earn more than $3,000 in awards.

We are set to have 400 student writers this year, so we need your help. There are two volunteer opportunities. You can register here and read more details below.

1. Read and score essays

Readers (AKA judges) just need a willingness to read student writing and a bit of time. Each judge will be given no more than 6 essays on Saturday, March 25, 2023 and asked to submit scores (according to a rubric that will be provided) by Monday, April 3, 2023.

If you're curious, you'll find this year's prompt here. It's about the biggest life lessons we would recommend for ourselves and others. 

2. Be a writing consultant

Writing consultants should have some experience writing or editing work for publication. The type of publication and amount of writing or editing experience is not important. Writing consultants just need to be able to listen to students talk about the progress they've made on the current draft of their story and lead a group conversation (consisting of up to three students and one consultant) on things each young writer may want to consider as he or she revises the piece ahead of the submission deadline. Consultations will take place on Friday, February 24, 2023 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. You can volunteer for as little as one hour online (via Zoom) or in person (at Baltimore City College High School).

To volunteer, please complete this short form.

More information about the Baldwin Prize:

- Learn all about the Prize and what students say about it in this short video.

- The Baldwin Prize blog has pictures and information from previous events as well as winning student essays.

​- And we have a newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The Baldwin Prize commissioned artist Peter Bruun to create this year's poster. In this lightly edited interview transcript, Bruun explains his process to Prize founder Lionel Foster. We would love for you to have and share this work. Click here to request a free poster or five postcards with the image. Special thanks to Jay Perry for graphic design layout.
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Making Socially Engaged Art 

For many years I have thought of myself as a covert social engagement artist, making seemingly esoteric and abstract paintings and drawings that in actuality are grounded in real things and relevant to others. My art is not really complete for me until its implicit narrative content is animated, typically through exhibitions and events that combine my art with stories from those whose own lives relate to its themes. My practice has brought me outside rarified art spaces, building connections between art and human issues.

When I lived in Baltimore, which is where you and I met, creating such communal experiences was entirely doable. But when I moved to Maine three years ago, I was separated from a well-established network that allowed me to connect easily with others. My abstract images—symbols or spirits or souls of ideas rather than embodiments—needed another solution besides community collaboration to make real this complementary aspect of concrete story.

That’s when I began writing directly onto my drawings in a sustained, ongoing way. Most specifically, I was processing through my art grief over my daughter’s passing and all that came with that. The story aspect was vital, and the way I dealt with some of that was to get words from others and put it physically in the drawings.

I had been making art this way for a couple years when you wandered back into my life and said, “Hey, could you do something for the Baldwin Prize?” 

​The project for the Baldwin Prize fits in that wheelhouse.

The Baldwin Prize Project

Once we knew I would combine an abstract image with Baldwin’s words, you and I began a process to sharpen the parameters of my task. First we talked about logistics, such as size and dimensions, then narrowed in. We floated a few different Baldwin quotations to use. You were clear I had freedom, which was good. The risk of any commission is that it can be soulless, just a gig. I needed to figure out that sweet spot where what Baldwin is saying resonates with a personal passion. We found that. The quotation we landed perfectly aligned with the theme of a project I had been working on about traveling through my own painful experience. To paraphrase Baldwin: You think you’re alone, alienated within your own unique bubble of suffering, and then you read and discover you’re not. And there’s so much solace in finding others with related experiences. It absolutely confirms our indelible connections to one another as humans. 

Making the Drawing 

When it came to making the actual drawing, my process was largely intuitive. I think of my linear abstractions as figurative. The way I begin work like this is almost like visualizing dance: body posture conveys human emotion. I visualize in my head a body taking certain poses. I don’t end up with an actual figure, but the initial mark might be the bend of an arm. I’ll put one bend of an arm down and maybe another. The way in is to make these marks in response to the figure I have in my head. The image in my head was of someone in pain, bent over. Then I would shift in my head and see a figure in elation or someone experiencing joy or connection. 

So that was my way into the drawing. With this piece, I had the concept of a figure kind of wrapping around the quote a little bit, sort of holding it up. Once I began making marks, as I entered into the work, the drawing started taking on a life of its own. So there are some conscious things going on and some intuitive things going on. One conscious thing: I wanted to use all the colors of the rainbow to capture the full range of human experience that writing conveys. And I wanted that sense of things rising, things being cut, bodies within the form. I only know I’m finished with a drawing once it stops talking at me, telling me what to do or change. When it’s silent, then I know nothing else needs to be done. It’s complete. 

​The thing about the words: I used ink. When I wrote those words there were two ink blots that fell. When the first one happened, I immediately thought, “Oh shit! I fucked it up.” But then right away I realized I liked the accident. It felt like it belonged there, evidence of doing the work. Then it happened again. I came to believe those ink blots are indicative of the experience of going into your pain. That to me felt consistent with the spirit of the figure. In a sense this drawing is about working through pain and arriving at beauty.

Finalists

Miles Anderson
August Baker
Kaycia Bent
Juliette Clausen
Roxana Contreras
Imani Dargan
Cassie Glover
Saniyah Grimes
Kane Hanson
Ja'Lisa Hegie
Kimberly Hernandez
Livia Horowitz
Lillian Imhoff
Sasha Jeudy
Sonia Korn
Kalkidan Mintesnot
Gideon Morley
Travis Pennington
Nora Pereira
Elena Plakosh
William Rivas
Lucinda Sheinin
Ingrid Sizer
Eli Weikert

Best Essay Involving Foreign-Language Translation

William Rivas

Best Audio Submission

Chiderá Obianuka   Text   Audio

Judge's Special Honor

Iche'la Carter
Ibeth Castillo
Edikan Ekanem
Kaliyah Harrison
Lila Lee
Anna Simms
Asia Webster