Banquet honors Gaines, Sternberg

• Advocate staff report
• Published: Aug 6, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Legendary fiction writer Ernest Gaines and Baton Rouge nonfiction author Mary Ann Sternberg will be recognized for their work to promote justice and harmony at the 46th annual Brotherhood and Sisterhood Awards Banquet Thursday, Aug. 21.

“We are pleased to honor the valuable contributions and dedication to the advancement of human relations from these very prominent artists and humanitarians. Their work to promote peace, harmony and goodwill deserves high praise,” said Ernie T. Hughes, chairman of this year’s event.

The awards were started under the auspices of the National Conference for Community and Justice and are now being continued by the 100 Black Men of Baton Rouge.

Hughes said the annual award program recognizes two individuals who have worked in their professional, philanthropic and volunteer capacities to break down barriers in the community.

“Both honorees, Ernest Gaines through his poignant tales of life and struggles in the rural South and Mary Ann Sternberg through her reflections of historic Louisiana, have promoted a better understanding of the unique and sometimes complicated aspects of our community,” Hughes said.

Gaines, a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has received critical acclaim for his fiction, and four of his works have been made into TV movies.

His 1993 novel, “A Lesson Before Dying,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2004, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The San Francisco State University graduate has also been named a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Gaines was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, an influence and common setting for his fiction.

Since 1984, he has divided his years between San Francisco and Lafayette, where he teaches a creative writing workshop at ULL. He maintains a residence in Oscar, where he and his wife, Diane Saulney, a lawyer, built a home on part of the old plantation where he grew up.

Sternberg serves as internship coordinator for the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication as well as a consultant for the school’s public relations efforts on behalf of its programs.

She is the author of four books, most recently “Winding Through Time: The Forgotten History and Present-Day Peril of Bayou Manchac,” and is a published freelance nonfiction writer and a public relations professional.

Her other nonfiction books include “Along the River Road,” “The Pelican Guide to Louisiana” and “The Southern Bride’s Notebook.”