The Langston Hughes Festival Award

The Langston Hughes Medal of The City College is awarded each year to a distinguished writer of African descent whose literary work has endeavored to engage, challenge and question their cultural milieu in the tradition of Langston Hughes.

In 1973, the late Raymond R. Patterson, Professor of English at The City College, founded the Langston Hughes Festival to celebrate Langston Hughes’s vision of himself as an African American citizen-poet—in his own words, “a human being {who} must live within his time, with and for his people, and within the boundaries of his country,”—by calling attention to the universality of the local values which form such “boundaries.”

Since 1978, the Langston Hughes Medal of The City College has been awarded to more than thirty writers. Those previously honored with the Langston Hughes Medal of The City College include: James Baldwin (1978), Gwendolyn Brooks (1979), John Oliver Killens (1980), Toni Cade Bambara (1981), Paule Marshall (1981), Toni Morrison (1981), Sterling A Brown (1982), Margaret Walker Alexander (1983), Ralph W. Ellison (1984), Raymond R. Patterson (1986), Dennis Brutus (1987), Alice Walker (1988), Amiri Baraka (1989), Alice Childress (1990), Maya Angelou (1991), August Wilson (1992), Chinua Achebe (1993), Ernest J. Gaines (1994), Ishmael Reed (1995), Nikki Giovanni (1996), Albert Murray (1997), George Lamming (1998), Sonia Sanchez (1999), Wolé Soyinka (2000), Jayne Cortez (2002), Derek Walcott (2002), Lucille Clifton (2003), James A. Emmanuel (2003), Arnold Rampersad (2003), Sekou Sundiata (2003), and John Edgar Wideman (2004).

Lawrence F. Sykes of Rhode Island College designed The City College Langston Hughes Award medallion from a photograph in the Langston Hughes papers at University (courtesy of the late George Houston Bass).