“Mother Emanuel” by Kevin Sack receives Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction
09/17/26
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, the first and only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States, today announces the winners for the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, honoring books published in 2025. The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman (HarperCollins) is the winner for fiction, and Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack (Crown) is the winner for nonfiction.
In response to winning the award, Sack said: “It is such a distinctly meaningful honor for this book to be recognized as an instrument of peace, and so my deepest thanks go to the judges and administrators of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. I take the recognition both as a tribute to the nine beautiful people who lost their lives to hate at Mother Emanuel in 2015, and as reaffirmation that the history of Black resistance to white supremacy is very much our shared American story, and should not be whitewashed or diminished.”
