Ladee Hubbard will join the 2021-2022 class of Berlin Prize Fellows at The American Academy In Berlin this fall. During her time at the American Academy, Ladee will work on her new novel placing the late twentieth-century War on Drugs in the larger historical context of African Americans being used in drug trials and medical experiments.
Ladee Hubbard will be a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow for 2021–2022. Ladee will use fiction to connect the 1980s War on Drugs to the larger history of African Americans’ experiences in drug trials and medical experiments.
Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins was awarded the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Novel.
In the words of the judges: “Characters map family secrets and lore as they reckon with magical powers that bring both vulnerability and strength. For better or for worse, they learn who they are in solitude and as a collective.”
The Guardian
Sept 14th, 2017
by Richard Lee
Ladee Hubbard: 'There’s an official history of how things were – and there's the truth'
"...At the dawn of the 20th century, the American sociologist and campaigner WEB Du Bois argued that African Americans needed more than industrial training to vanquish inequality in the wake of slavery, declaring: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”
“The problem of education,” he wrote in a celebrated 1903 essay, “must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races...”
Late Night with Seth Meyers
Oct 10th, 2017
The amazing Ladee Hubbard, author of The Talented Ribkins, was on Late Night with Seth Meyers!
The conversation touched on all kinds of things: which superheroes are coolest, what it’s like having Toni Morrison for a thesis advisor, WEB Du Bois’s essay “The Talented Tenth,” how a short story turns into a novel, and what it’s like when a professor has to cancel class so she can chat wittily with Seth Meyers on national TV for the night.
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction 2018
Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence 2018
The Best Books of 2017 - Kirkus Reviews
An INDIE NEXT 2017 pick
Winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award
Winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Prize