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.