Rob Franklin’s novel Great Black Hope has won the 19th Annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
Rob Franklin has been named the recipient of the 19th annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for his debut novel Great Black Hope.
Great Black Hope tells the story of Smith, an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamourous parties and sudden consequences, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest. A national bestseller, the novel was also nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence — it was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, Vogue, NPR, and Vanity Fair, among others.
Franklin is a writer and professor. He has written cover stories for Cultured Magazine, The Cut, and Document Journal. A co-founder of Art for Black Lives, Franklin holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. He teaches writing at School of Visual Arts and edits fiction for Joyland. He lives in New York.
Franklin will be honored during a public ceremony on October 30, 2026, at 6 p.m. at the Manship Theater in the Shaw Center for the Arts, located at 100 Lafayette Street in Downtown Baton Rouge. The evening will celebrate his remarkable debut and pay tribute to the legacy of Ernest J. Gaines, whose body of work helped shape the landscape of American literature.
Ernest J. Gaines with his wife, Dianne.
“My wife, Dianne, and I are very happy to be a part of this exciting project established by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to recognize the best newly published African-American writers from across the country.”
About the award
The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence honors Louisiana’s revered storyteller, Ernest J. Gaines, and serves to inspire and recognize rising African-American fiction writers of excellence at a national level. The book award, initiated by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, is now in its 16th year and has become nationally recognized in its role of enhancing visibility of emerging African-American fiction writers while also expanding the audience for this literature. The annual award of a $15,000 cash prize is to support and enable the writer to focus on writing.
The 2023 panel of judges are themselves renowned contributors to the literary world. They are Anthony Grooms, Edward P. Jones, Elizabeth Nunez, Francine Prose and Patricia Towers.
The Baton Rouge Area Foundation sponsors the winner’s travel to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to receive the prize at a ceremony, where the author reads an excerpt from the selected work of fiction. A reception follows. The evening is free, open to the public and attracts a diverse audience.
The literary award winner also participates in educational activities at selected area schools and after-school programs in keeping with the Gaines Award's interest in emphasizing the role of literature and arts in education. Through small creative writing workshops with the winning author, students are encouraged to pursue reading, delve into their own creativity, and to consider becoming an author.