The Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry are pleased to announce the winners of the Morris D. and Selma V. Forkosch Awards for calendar year 2020.
Established in 1988, the Morris D. Forkosch Award recognizes the best humanist book of the year and carries an honorarium of $1,000. The Selma V. Forkosch Award recognizes the year’s outstanding article in Free Inquiry magazine, the Council’s flagship journal, and carries a prize of $250.
The Morris D. Forkosch Award for Best Book of 2020 goes to journalist Katherine Stewart for her exposé The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury), a powerful and disturbing portrait of the authoritarian, divisive movement sometimes inadequately described as the religious Right.
The Selma V. Forkosch Award for Best Article for 2020 goes to historian Judith Wellman for her essay in the August/September 2020 issue of Free Inquiry, “What Can Historic Sites Tell Us about the Movement for Woman Suffrage in New York State?” The article explores the role of historic sites in interpreting the history of the woman suffrage movement, which began in west-central New York State in 1848.
The most recent previous Morris D. Forkosch Award winners included Stephen Waldman for Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom (2019) and Catherine Nixey for The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2018). Previous winners have also included Susan Jacoby for The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (2012), Daniel C. Dennett for Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), and Stephen Jay Gould for Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989).
Previous Selma V. Forkosch Award winners have included Brian Bolton for “Still Not a Christian Nation: Every Reason America Is Secular, In One Place” (2019) and Lowrey R. Brown for “By My Own Hand: Suicide Can Be a Wise and Gentle Choice” (2018).
Nominations are now being accepted for the best book and best Free Inquiry article of 2021 and will remain open throughout the calendar year. Individuals wishing to nominate a work should email Free Inquiry Editor Tom Flynn at [email protected]
Free Inquiry is copublished by the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry.