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BATON ROUGE, La. —Two longtime advocates for literacy in the state were recognized with a special award during the Louisiana Book Festival.
Ann Dobie and Susan Larson were recognized with the inaugural Louisiana Literary Icon Award, presented by the Louisiana Center for the Book. The awards, unbeknownst to recipients, were revealed for the first time during the book festival.
The Louisiana Literary Award was envisioned to periodically recognize individuals’ significant contributions which align with the Center’s mission to promote reading, literacy, and Louisiana books, authors, and publishers, as well as their support of the Center’s programming, especially its flagship Louisiana Book Festival.
“We recognized Ann and Susan during the same ceremony in which we honored the 2024 Louisiana Writer Award recipient, David Kirby. It was a surprise and done at the right place and the right time,” said Jim Davis, executive director of the Louisiana Center for the Book. “The Louisiana Writer Award is presented to a great writer. But there are so many people who work hard behind the scenes to promote writers and their works. We thought it was time to recognize them as well. With the inauguration of this award, as we looked back over the two decades of the festival and the support of Susan and Ann over those years, it was clear to us that both deserved to receive the initial award.”
Dobie is professor emerita of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she directed graduate studies in rhetoric and the university's writing-across-the-curriculum program.
While Dobie has written about Louisiana, she also spent much of her career promoting the work of other Louisianans. She is editor of several literary anthologies about writers and poets from Louisiana: two short stories anthologies Something in Common and Wide Awake in the Pelican State and Uncommonplace, the poetry anthology. A glimpse at the table of contents for these reveals that among those included are several writers who went on to become Louisiana Writer Award recipients and Louisiana Poet Laureates.
For 13 years Dobie served as director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana, state coordinator of the Louisiana Writing Project, director of the Rural Sites Network of the National Writing Project, coordinator of the Louisiana Writes! youth writing competition (including entries in English and French), and head of the selection committee for Letters About Literature, a Louisiana Center for the Book youth writing competition in partnership with the Library of Congress.
“It was a total surprise. They really put it over on me. I wasn’t sure it was happening,” Dobie said of the award presentation. “It was deeply meaningful. It was especially gratifying since so many of the people I worked with over the years were there. And the Louisiana Book Festival is one of the best things this state does. It’s wonderful. I want to continue to support literacy. It’s so important for us to have a literate populace and voting base.”
Larson was the book editor for The Times-Picayune from 1988-2009. She now hosts The Reading Life radio program and podcast through WWNO-FM and WRKF-FM, the NPR affiliates in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. She is also the author of The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans, which is described as the “definitive guide … to the books, authors, festivals, stores, and famed addresses that make the Crescent City a literary destination.”
Larson also served on the boards of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and the New Orleans Public Library and is the founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Women's National Book Association.
Throughout the years, Larson promoted the festival with lengthy articles in The Picayune and reviews of featured festival books, and she also annually appeared on WYES-TV’s Steppin’ Out to share highlights of the upcoming festival and has announced the festival on her radio program and podcast so Louisianans can know about their state’s official book festival.
“I am so honored and grateful to receive this award. It means so much, coming from one of my favorite festivals,” Larson said. “As a literary journalist, I have had the lucky job of reading about Louisiana — first for 22 years at The Times-Picayune, more recently for 14 years as the host of The Reading Life — and I continue to be awed and delighted by the vast array of writing produced in and about our state. We have an amazing combination of interesting and generous writers, independent bookstores and libraries, dedicated literary activists, and gatherings like the Louisiana Book Festival that celebrate our literary community and keep it lively. People praise our food and dance to our music, to be sure, and they read our stories to nourish their souls.”
"These first two recipients of the Icon award both have been such wonderful resources and advocates for our efforts over these many years that we genuinely consider them members of the extended State Library of Louisiana family,” said State Librarian Meg Placke.
“It is we who are honored and privileged to be able to acknowledge the contributions of both Ann and Susan with this unique and rare award,” Davis added. “Just as Louisiana Writer Award recipients realize that the first one was presented to Ernest Gaines, there will be other Icon recipients in years to come who when looking back will themselves truly value the prestige of the award because it was first given to Ann and Susan.”
The Louisiana Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, was established in the State Library of Louisiana in 1994. Its mission is to stimulate public interest in reading, books, literacy, and libraries and to celebrate Louisiana's rich literary heritage through events such as the Louisiana Book Festival.