English’s Fultz Wins Award for Book on Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference, a penetrating study of Morrison’s work by Lucille Fultz, has garnered the 2005 Toni Morrison Society Book Award.

The award honors outstanding books about Morrison, recipient of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature and considered one of America’s most influential writers. Fultz, an associate professor of English, received the award in July at the biennial conference of the Toni Morrison Society (TMS), an author society of the American Literature Association.

The society praised Fultz’s book, which was published in 2003, for its sophisticated and nuanced mapping of Morrison’s ideological and artistic development from her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970) to Paradise (1998). The award committee noted, “Fultz not only elegantly synthesizes multiple strands of Morrison scholarship, but she also invites the reader to participate in this process, to accompany her on her intellectual journey. As such, what Morrison succeeds in doing in her novels—‘to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate’—Fultz achieves in her own criticism.”

Described as “one of the most comprehensive studies to date of Morrison,” Playing with Difference explores Morrison’s body of work, uncovering the interplay between differences—love and hate, masculinity and femininity, black and white, past and present, wealth and poverty—that lie at the heart of these vibrant and complex narratives.