Michelle Obama Award will honor student memoir writers
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — A literary honor has been named for a uniquely successful author: the Michelle Obama Award for Memoir. Penguin Random House announced Wednesday that the renaming of the award in its Creative Writing Awards program, which also includes categories named for Amanda Gorman for poetry and Maya Angelou for spoken word. The Obama prize will provide a $10,000 college scholarship to a high school senior in public school based on an autobiographical English-language composition. Obama’s memoir “Becoming” was published in 2018 and has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, by far the most popular book by a modern White House resident.