Celebrated Author Will Give Public Reading at Chautauqua Institution on Aug. 19 

Chautauqua Institution today proudly announces The Reformatory: A Novel (Saga Press) by Tananarive Due as the 2024 winner of The Chautauqua Prize. 

Awarded annually since 2012, the Prize celebrates a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. As author of this year’s winning book, Due receives $7,500, and will be presented with the Prize during a celebratory event and public reading at 5 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 19, in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy. 

The Reformatory is a genre-defying work that is equal parts historical fiction, magical realism, supernatural horror, and speculative fiction. In this gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida, readers follow Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice — for the living, and for the dead. 

“The Reformatory is a novel that deserves to be celebrated by enthusiasts of literary, historical, cultural, and mainstream circles alike,” noted Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill.   

“With eloquence, poignancy, and great care, Tananarive Due has crafted a book that thrills, enchants and haunts you,” Hill said. “What is truly remarkable about the work is how it expands the horror novel’s audience, welcoming new readers to the genre with her accessible — even addicting — prose. This means as many people as possible can engage in the act of collective remembering, ensuring that stories such as these will not be forgotten. 

“Ultimately — and serendipitously, considering we celebrate the seasons and stories of Chautauqua during this 150th anniversary summer — The Reformatory is a narrative about the power of story. It’s a master class in the infinitesimal and expansive impact a story’s telling can have on an individual, a community, and a nation, just as much as it is about elevating stories that have been silenced.”    

Due’s book is “a touching, heartbreaking, and tragically powerful story about a horrific episode in American history,” said Kwame Alexander, the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Chautauqua. “Truly magical, this novel will bring about the kinds of honest conversation that will haunt and heal readers at Chautauqua and beyond.” 

The 2024 guest judges for The Chautauqua Prize lauded the book. Best-selling author Victoria Christopher Murray called the novel “engrossing and heart-stopping, a work that refuses to be stupefied by the cruelty it addresses in both history and justice. The Reformatory is masterful storytelling, Tananarive Due at her best.” The Prize jury frequently remarked on the many ways in which Due provides entry points for her readers into this genre and topic via her dynamic, complex characters. 

“It’s the characters that stay with me,” said award-winning author Phil Klay. “In The Reformatory, Due evokes not simply historical horror but also the subtle ways in which humans acclimate to horror, become complicit, or begin to struggle against it. And because of that, because the characters are so rich, so finely drawn, there’s an incredible power the novel gathers as it moves forward. I could not put the book down.” 

Since first appearing on bookshelves in October 2023, The Reformatory has been named a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, an American Library Association Notable Book, and a New York Times Notable Book.  

Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­-winning author, who was an executive producer on “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science-fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and a second-season episode of “The Twilight Zone” for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). 

The Chautauqua Prize, this year awarded for the 13th time, has been inspired since its inception by the late literary and entertainment industry attorney Michael I. Rudell, and his wife, Alice. Previous winners include The Sojourn, by Andrew Krivak (2012); Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, by Timothy Egan (2013); My Foreign Cities, by Elizabeth Scarboro (2014); Redeployment, by Phil Klay (2015); Off the Radar, by Cyrus Copeland (2016); The Fortunes, by Peter Ho Davies (2017); The Fact of a Body, by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich (2018); All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva (2019); Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah (2020); Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss (2021); All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner (2022); and The Song of the Cell, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2023). 

Winners of The Chautauqua Prize are noteworthy for their capacity to open inquiry and create an inviting space for conversation among many kinds of readers, making the books an ideal vehicle to engage in Chautauqua Institution’s historic tradition of reading and discussion in community. Chautauqua’s other annual literary award, the Chautauqua Janus Prize, celebrates experimental writers who have not yet published a book. Taken together, these prizes ensure that both tradition and innovation live at the heart of a Chautauqua reader’s life of learning. 

Details on The Chautauqua Prize are available online at prize.chq.org. Books published in 2024 will be accepted as submissions for the 2025 Prize beginning in September 2024. 

Praise for The Reformatory: A Novel 

“A riveting masterpiece that manages to be both heartwarming and chilling … literally impossible to stop reading.” 
–Locus Magazine 

“You’re in for a treat. The Reformatory is one of those books you can’t put down. Tananarive Due hit it out of the park.” 
— Stephen King 

“One of the best novels published in 2023. A superb mix of literary fiction, horror, and historical fiction.” 
– Gabino Iglesias, NPR Books 

“The Reformatory is a masterpiece — a new American classic of the uncanny. I was gripped from the first lines to the catch-your-breath desperation of the final pages. Even in the tale’s grimmest moments, Tananarive Due insists on the almost supernatural power of simple kindness. You have to read this book.” 
— Joe Hill, No. 1 New York Times best-selling author of The Fireman 

“Moby Dick might have flipped America on its back to show the rotting underbelly, but The Reformatory’s looking just as closely at our bad history, and somehow finding the heart beating underneath it all. This is the novel I’ve been waiting for. It breaks your heart, but it also holds it together.” 
– Stephen Graham Jones, best-selling author of The Only Good Indians and My Heart is a Chainsaw 

“An epic novel of horror and real history. Tananarive Due displays all her powers as a master of the form, there’s frights and chills and also so much love. I tore through this book. This novel is a straight up masterpiece, it should be read and remembered for a long time.” 
– Victor LaValle, best-selling author of The Changeling, and Lone Women 

“Tananarive Due at her best. Hallucinatory, haunting, terrifying and moving, a tour de force of a novel.” 
– S. A. Cosby, best-selling author of All the Sinners Bleed, Razorblade Tears and Blacktop 

“The writing here is spectacular; the pacing, engrossing; the setting, heartbreaking but honest; and the characters are given a nuance and depth rarely seen … A masterpiece of fiction.”  
—Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW 
 
“With fully realized characters and well-placed twists, Due ratchets up the tension until the final, extraordinary showdown.” 
–Booklist, STARRED REVIEW 
 
“A vividly realized page-turner, which is at once an ingenious ghost story, a white-knuckle adventure, and an illuminating if infuriating look back at a shameful period in American jurisprudence.” 
–Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW 

“Her fiction is always powerful, and The Reformatory promises to be her most moving — and horrifying — tale yet.”  
—Vulture 
 
“One of the greatest living horror writers … Sure to be as powerful as it is haunting.”  
—CrimeReads 
 
“Due knocks it out of the park every damn time.”  
—Book Riot 
 

ABOUT THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE    
Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize draws upon Chautauqua Institution’s considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The author of the winning book will receive $7,500 and will participate in a Prize ceremony and reading on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution during the 2024 Summer Assembly Season. For more information, visit prize.chq.org.     

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY ARTS    
With a history steeped in the literary arts, Chautauqua Institution is the home of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, which honors at least nine outstanding books of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry with community discussions and author presentations every summer. Further literary arts programs at Chautauqua include the Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference — which convenes writers each June in workshops, panels, and other conversations that draw fruitful and urgent connections between the personal, the political and the craft of writing — as well as the summer-long workshops, craft lectures and readings from some of the very best author-educators in North America at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Chautauqua Literary Arts is led by the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of the Literary Arts, an endowed chair established in memory of a beloved Chautauquan who, among other things, inspired Chautauqua’s first literary award, The Chautauqua Prize.   

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION    
Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer — and year-round through the CHQ Assembly online platforms — with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.    

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