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1934 wins the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award!

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We’re thrilled to share that on November 4th, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year by Heidi LM Jacobs was named the winner of the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award. 1934 was published in June 2023 by Biblioasis. You can read the official announcement here.

The Honourable Ted Arnott, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, made the announcement at a ceremony at the Legislative Building, Queen’s Park.

Launched in 2012, the Speaker’s Book Award honours non-fiction works by Ontario authors reflecting the diverse culture and rich history of the province and its residents. Winning books are available for sale at the Legislative Gift Shop and featured in the Legislative Library.

Get your copy of 1934 here!

ABOUT 1934: THE CHATHAM COLOURED ALL-STARS’ BARRIER-BREAKING YEAR

Winner of the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award

The true story of the first Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship.

The pride of Chatham’s East End, the Coloured All-Stars broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the Major Leagues. Fielding a team of the best Black baseball players from across southwestern Ontario and Michigan, theirs is a story that could only have happened in this particular time and place: during the depths of the Great Depression, in a small industrial town a short distance from the American border, home to one of the most vibrant Black communities in Canada.

Drawing heavily on scrapbooks, newspaper accounts, and oral histories from members of the team and their families, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year shines a light on a largely overlooked chapter of Black baseball. But more than this, 1934 is the story of one group of men who fought for the respect that was too often denied them.

Rich in detail, full of the sounds and textures of a time long past, 1934 introduces the All-Stars’ unforgettable players and captures their winning season, so that it almost feels like you’re sitting there in Stirling Park’s grandstands, cheering on the team from Chatham.

Credit: Lively Creative Co.

ABOUT HEIDI LM JACOBS

Heidi LM Jacobs’ previous books include the novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019), which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020, and 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021). She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project.

100 MILES OF BASEBALL Virtual Book Launch Video

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We had a fantastic night celebrating the virtual launch of Dale and Heidi LM Jacobs’ 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer! Kicking off the event was a Q&A and excerpt reading with the authors and guest Michael Elves, discussing everything from long drives to the ballpark, to the multitude of different ways people can watch the same game, and keeping the rediscovered love of baseball from going out again. A beautiful musical performance from Crissi Cochrane was given, before the night came to a close with a book giveaway.

 

In case you missed it, you can still watch the video here below:

 

ABOUT 100 MILES OF BASEBALL

By the end of the 2016 season, Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs both finally admitted to themselves and to each other that they were losing interest in the Tigers and, consequently, in baseball itself—a thread that had not only connected the two of them, but brought them together with their families and with their own histories as well. They weren’t sure what they were missing, but they had an idea where it might be found: in their own backyard. Drawing a radius of one hundred miles around their home in Windsor, Ontario, Heidi and Dale set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle in one summer, a schedule that took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, from bleachers behind high schools, to manicured university turf, to the steep concrete stands of major league parks. 100 MILES OF BASEBALL is the story of their rediscovery of their love of the game—and with it their relationships, and the region they call home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game (Black Moss Press, 2015) and The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), and co-editor (with Laura Micciche) of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 2003). His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press. He is the editor of The Windsor Review and teaches in the English Department at the University of Windsor.

Heidi LM Jacobs’ novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020. She is a librarian at the University of Windsor and one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. She is currently co-writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association Championship (forthcoming from Wilfred Laurier University Press). Originally from Edmonton, she now lives in Windsor, Ontario.

 

Order your copy now here, or from your local bookstore!