Percival Everett wins 2022 Clark Fiction Prize for The Trees

Percival Everett’s novel, The Trees, has won the 2022 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. The $25,000 prize—one of the largest literary awards in the United States—recognizes exceptional fiction written in the previous year. 

Since 2016, Texas State’s Department of English has administered the award in celebration of the Clarks’ lifelong contributions to, and love for, literature and the arts. 

"The Trees is a rare novel in that through the murder mystery form it delivers a profound indictment of our country’s bedrock of racial terror and the mounting atrocities of White supremacy,” said Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Clark Prize final judge, author of Sabrina & Corina and the Texas State MFA Program’s University Endowed Chair. “Fast-paced, at times wry and surreal, The Trees speaks an often unspoken truth—the genocidal scale of American lynchings of Black men and other non-white people throughout our country’s existence."

The Trees opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner and a string of racist townsfolk. At each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was murdered in Money in 1955. The detectives suspect these are retribution killings, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried.

In this powerful book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is a novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

Everett is the author of more than 30 novels and story collections, including Dr. NO, Telephone, So Much Blue, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure. Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle; the Dos Passos Prize; the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award; the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction; the 2010 Believer Book Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; a Creative Capital Award; and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Everett is currently a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.

Texas State will celebrate Everett and his work on April 6 with a 6 p.m. event in The Wittliff Galleries. The 2022 Clark Prize shortlist included the novels Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman, Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell, and The Five Wounds by Kristin Valdez Quade. Nominations of works published in 2022 were solicited from 12 prominent writers on the condition of anonymity, and the permanent fiction faculty of the Texas State MFA Program narrowed those nominations down to the shortlist.

About the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Literary Endowment

L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark donated their home and other property to Texas State in 2009 to create an endowment to support writers-in-residence. The Clark Literary Endowment funds the annual L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, which is among the most generous fiction prizes in the country. It also funds a writers-in-residence program that offers one-year residencies to graduates of the Texas State MFA program at the Clarks’ historic home on Main Street in Smithville, 55 miles east of the Texas State campus. The Department of English and MFA Program in Creative Writing within the College of Liberal Arts sponsors the writers-in-residence program. The endowment also funds numerous scholarships for Texas State MFA students. 

For more information, visit www.english.txstate.edu/clarkfictionprize.html