2012 Recipient

Jill Lepore Is the 2112 Sarah Josepha Hale Award Recipient
The Trustees of the Richards Free Library and the Judges of the Sarah Josepha Hale award are pleased to announce that historian, Jill Lepore, is the 2012 Hale Award Medalist. She will accept the award on November 10, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. at the Newport Opera House.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include: The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History; New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity; and Blindspot, A Novel written with Jane Kamensky, a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her newest book, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death is due out in June, 2012.
She has won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize.
A prolific writer, her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History, American Quarterly and in Common-place the magazine she co-founded with Jane Kamensky.
She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family.
In selecting Jill Lepore for the Hale Award the Judges cited her range of writing from essays, book reviews, and scholarly history to novels. One judge praised her ability to discuss “all of US history in a paragraph”.
For over fifty years, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, has been given by the trustees of the Richards Free Library, in recognition of a distinguished body of written work in the field of literature and letters. The award honors Sarah Josepha Hale, author, poet, and essayist, who as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine shaped the opinion of nineteenth century American women. The list of Hale Award winners includes the finest writers of our times from Robert Frost in 1956 to Galway Kinnell in 2011.
For more information about the Hale award please contact Andrea Thorpe, Library Director at 603-863-3430 or rfl@newport.lib.nh.us.