'Hemingses Of Monticello' Author Gordon-Reed, 2009 George Washington Book Prize Winner Appears At Washington College

Chestertown – Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience welcomed Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the 2009 George Washington Book Prize, for a special college celebration of the $50,000 award for the best book on the founding era in American history.

The celebration of Gordon-Reed's winning book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, took place on Thursday, Oct. 22, in the college’s new Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts. The event featured an insightful interview with Gordon-Reed hosted by Adam Goodheart, the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center, followed by questions from the audience.

A professor of law at New York University Law School, Gordon-Reed spent more than seven years working on The Hemingses of Monticello. Her meticulously researched account documents not only Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, but also the lives of four generations of the family that lived with Jefferson from the 1770s until he died in 1826.

In addition to garnering the highly coveted George Washington Book Prize (one of the most generous book awards in the country), The Hemingses of Monticello enjoyed an unprecedented trifecta in spring 2009 by also winning a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for History. In September 2009 the book added to its laurels by also winning the Frederick Douglass Prize, awarded annually to the year’s most outstanding work on the history of slavery.