Columbia University Press, in conjunction with the Office of the Provost of Columbia University, is pleased to announce that A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America by Lance Freeman is the winner of the sixth annual Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.

Lance Freeman is a professor in the Urban Planning Program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. He is the author of There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (2005).

Neeraj Kaushal’s Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement is the runner-up for the Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.

Neeraj Kaushal is professor of social policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany.

The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award is given to the Columbia University faculty member(s) whose book published by the Press in the two years prior brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse. The winner is selected by a jury composed of the current members of the Press’s Faculty Publication Committee.

In presenting the award, Professor Adam Reich, chair of the Distinguished Book Award jury and chair of Columbia University Press’s Faculty Publication Committee, commented, “Freeman’s rich historical account illustrates how pernicious processes of racial domination and exclusion created predominantly Black neighborhoods in Northern U.S. cities.  Yet he also shows how these same processes created the conditions of possibility for autonomous Black social institutions and collective identities.  Freeman seamlessly combines statistical and archival data with the voices of Black artists, activists, intellectuals, and business and political leaders across nearly 150 years of U.S. history for an account that is at once soaring and surprisingly intimate.”

The other members of the Distinguished Book Award jury were Jenny Davidson, Manan Ahmed, and Rae Silver.

A ceremony to honor the winners will be held in the spring of 2021, circumstances permitting, at the Casa Italiana at Columbia University. The author of the winning book receives a certificate and a cash award of $10,000.