2009 Annual Benefit Gala
The First Annual Benefit Gala took place on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City. Tina Brown and David Remnick served as Co-Chairs for the evening. Calvin "Bud" Trillin served as the Master of Ceremonies.
2009 Annual Benefit Gala
Tuesday, October 20, 2009· 7:00 PM
Toni Morrison
Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement
Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities Emerita at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.
Her nine major novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, and A Mercy, have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved.
Ms. Morrison has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Colombia, Brown, University of Michigan, École Normale Supérieure, Université Paris 7‐ Denis Diderot, and the Université Paris Sorbonne‐Paris IV. She was also the first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987 and was a New York State Governor’s Arts Awardee in 1986. Other prestigious awards include: the Dun Bois Medal, 2005; the 2000 National Humanities Medal; the 2000 Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend Award; the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature, 1994; the Condorcet Medal, Paris, 1994; Pearl Buck Award, 1994; Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Paris, 1993; the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in Literature, 1989; Sara Lee Corporation Front Runner Award in the Arts, 1989; Anisfield Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988; the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 1978; and the Distinguished Writer Award of 1978 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1993 Ms. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
David Halberstam (1934-2007)
Mailer Prize for Distinguished Journalism
David Halberstam was an American Pulitzer Prize‐winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, business, media, and American culture, and his later sports journalism. In the mid‐1960s, Halberstam covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times. In the spring of 1967, he traveled with Martin Luther King from New York City to Cleveland and then to Berkeley for a Harper’s article, “The Second Coming of Martin Luther King.” In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at The New York Times, including his eyewitness account of the self‐immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war.
Halberstam next wrote about President John F. Kennedy‘s foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War in The Best and the Brightest. After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam went to work on his next book, which
became 1979’s The Powers That Be, featuring profiles of media titans like William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Phil Graham of The Washington Post. In 1997, Halberstam received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as
well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.
In the wake of 9/11, Halberstam wrote a book about the attacks, Firehouse, which describes in detail Engine 40, Ladder 35 of the New York City Fire Department. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, Halberstam’s last book, was
published posthumously in September 2007.
JEAN HALBERSTAM (accepted the award for her husband)
Jean Halberstam is a former reporter in Chicago and New York. She has served on the founding boards of God’s Love We Deliver and Friends In Deed, and is presently a creative consultant for the National Parks of New York Harbor
Conservancy. She is also a fund‐raiser for Teach for America’s David Halberstam Endowment Fund which supports TFA in the Mississippi Delta where David’s professional career began. They were married for thirty years and have one daughter, Julia, a teacher committed to public education.
The winners of the Mailer National Student Writing Contests, presented in partnership with theNational Council of Teachers of English, were…
- National High School Award: Emily Swanagin, Luna
- National College Award: John Gilmore, Final Cascade
The evening’s sponsors included: American Airlines, The Armand F. Erpf Foundation, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Tina Brown & Sir Harold Evans, Marco Colodro & Susan Mailer, Angelo Galasso, Gagosian Gallery, Giorgio Armani, GQ Magazine, Dylan Jones, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, Mandarin Oriental New York, National Madison Group, Inc., Phillips de Pury, Random House, Inc., Benedikt Taschen, Taki Theodoracopulos, Tommy Hilfiger Group, and Van Cleef & Arpels.