“It felt like a benediction from Richard Holbrooke himself,” Rab recalled – a blessing for her vision for an annual literary event celebrating writers whose work advances the cause of peace. “It made me feel that I was on the track.”
The following year, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (DLPP) was born, honoring working-class chronicler Studs Terkel with its first lifetime achievement award. It has since grown into one of the world’s most coveted writing awards. Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Gloria Steinem and Wil Haygood are among the luminaries who have interacted with Dayton audiences and students since the DLPP’s inception in 2006.
The Dayton Peace Accords also sparked the creation of the Dayton Peace Prize, which recognizes individuals who have contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation.
The Peace Prize, which has been awarded every five years or so since 2000, will be presented Nov. 15 to Nicholas Burns, the chief spokesperson for the State Department during the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Past recipients include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former President Bill Clinton, and former Ambassador and Congressman Tony Hall.
The involvement of everyday Daytonians, in short, didn’t end after the ink was dried on the peace agreement in 1995. These two internationally-recognized awards constitute one of the most enduring legacies of the those historic three weeks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, continuing to engage the community in conversations about peace. “The underlying theme is that we want what evolved out of Dayton to continue to be successful for the people of Bosnia and the Republic of Serbia,” said retired Lt. Col. John McCance, co-chair of Dayton Peace Accords anniversary committee, which awards the Dayton Peace Prize.
“There are not enough peace prizes in the world to give to all the people who deserve them,” observed his co-chair, Dayton City Commissioner Matt Joseph. “So often those who work for peace are met with derision. If there were more peace prizes, maybe there wouldn’t be so many wars.”
Burns is the perfect choice as this year’s recipient, Joseph said, and not merely because the award will be presented as part of the November events celebrating the 30th anniversary of the peace talks in which he played such a significant role. Joseph lauded Burns’ work as U.S. Ambassador to China from 2022 to 2025: “Nick was given the momentous task of reopening dialogue between the U.S. and China, and he did a great job. And by coming here to accept the award in Dayton, Burns has come full circle.”
Noted McCance, “Nick Burns held a pivotal position during the Dayton peace talks, carrying the message of the State Department every day to the international press. It was very intense. He was serving two masters, much like being press secretary to the President.”
Burns now teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government as Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations. Receiving the Peace Prize in Dayton will be a full-circle moment for him, he said, commemorating a highlight in his 45-year career in American diplomacy: “I will feel very honored when I receive the award in Dayton, although I certainly am not in the company of past recipients. When I look back on my career, one of the most dramatic and emotional times was between Nov. 1 and Nov. 21, 1995, in Dayton.”
Selecting Dayton as the site for the talks was a master stroke by Holbrooke, Burns noted: “Dick came up with the idea we are going to sequester the Serbs and Croats and Bosnian Muslims in the officers quarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and force them to stay until there’s an agreement. If we had been in Washington, D.C., or New York City, they could have gone out to the cameras after each failed day and debated each other in public and maybe ruined the peace talks. The fact that we were going to be at an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, meant they couldn’t go out to Fifth Avenue, where all the U.S. networks are. Dayton was the right place for us, and we all got to know Packy’s Sports Bar.”
The two peace prizes remain complementary, while sustaining the spirit of the peace talks in distinctive ways. The Peace Prize is a more direct descendant of the Dayton Peace Accords, Joseph explained, typically honoring the traditional peacemakers such as diplomats and world leaders who exhibit moral authority.
Credit: Photo: courtesy of YWCA Dayton
Credit: Photo: courtesy of YWCA Dayton
“The Dayton Literary Peace Prize sprang from Sharon Rab’s genius, from her vision of how to commemorate the work of the peacemakers,” added Joseph, who also serves on the advisory committee for the DLPP. “Her mind went to the thing it knows best, and that is literature. They built a sustainable structure, and they have awarded the prize all these years in a way that we as a community are involved and able to support it.”
Armed with an English teacher’s belief in the power of words, Rab was determined to establish an annual literary award that would keep that spirit alive. The idea first came to her through her involvement with the Dayton Council on World Affairs and the original Dayton peace process committee awarding the Dayton Peace Prize.
“As an English teacher, I saw the way that literature changed people, and I saw that literature even saved lives,” Rab said. “The best example is ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ I saw kids blown out of the water by that book, and it paved the way for young people to embrace the changes of the civil rights movement.”
Despite many warnings that an annual event would prove too ambitious, Rab took Holbrooke’s admonition to heart; she wanted to celebrate peace every year. Her grassroots operation inched toward the goal of $40,000 in seed money one small donation at a time. It felt like a major milestone when the indomitable Doris Ponitz scored a $5,000 gift from Sinclair Community College. Friends came over for postage parties, mailing out some 2,000 invitations.
Since the resounding success of that first gala, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize has grown into a year-round event that encompasses classroom visits from authors, literary symposiums and lectures, and even a monthly virtual book club.
Students throughout the region have been profoundly affected by in-person visits from authors they admire, according to Tippecanoe High School English teacher Aimee Noel, who serves as a curriculum committee member for the DLPP. They were particularly impressed with the acclaimed young novelist Yaa Gyasi, author of the bestselling “Homegoing.”
“What was remarkable is that she’s a living author of whom they could ask questions about her experiences and travel and research and ideas, and also the process of writing,” Noel said.
Her students also have attended the annual DLPP gala on scholarship and spoken with writers such as Sandra Cisneros, winner of the 2023 Holbrooke Award and author of “The House on Mango Street.”
Noel said, “The students have read the book and here they are meeting the woman who wrote it, and she was so humble and kind and so curious about them and their lives. It’s a moment they will never forget. They feel a resurgence of love for this author, and now she’s a human being to them.”
Students also attended the May 15 special event celebrating the 20th anniversary, with keynote speaker Susan Southard, a former nonfiction winner and author of “Nagasaki — Life After Nuclear War.”
Most students were unaware that the Bockscar – the B-29 bomber that dropped a nuclear weapon on Nagasaki – is on permanent display at the United States National Air Force Museum. “Events such as these and the galas give our students a window into the world and even their own communities,” Noel said. “They see all these respected people doing this work for peace, and it brings the abstract into the concrete. There is a building of empathy that really supports and validates what we do in the classroom when we go to these functions.”
Contemporary novels and nonfiction works pique the students’ interest in reading, Noel said: “They’re engaging with situations and populations that are new and alive in ways that aren’t always there in the texts of their school curriculums. The material gives them a greater curiosity and a wider view.”
One student recently asked, for instance, “How am I a junior in high school, and just now learning about redlining?”
Observed Noel, “We are a global society, and our students can’t survive on a diet of Dickens. He’s good, but you can’t have him for every meal.”
It’s not only students whose lives have been changed by their involvement with the DLPP. Army veteran Logan Young first became involved when she was asked to take part in a 2019 panel featuring David Wood, author of “What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars.”
“When I got out of the military, I felt really lost,” said Young, who served in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. “This book cracked open a lot of issues I hadn’t dealt with or even acknowledged. It put language to feelings I couldn’t explain or articulate.”
Since then, Young has not only attended countless DLPP events, but also has spread the word about “What Have We Done” to every veteran she can reach. She even started a book club for veterans. “I told everyone I know about the book and the lens it provided for what we had gone through,” she said.
Her experience with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize ultimately led not only to such advocacy work but also to her current pursuit of a doctoral degree in leadership and change from Antioch University. “We live in such insular worlds,” Young said. “Language and books and literature can peel back the layers and enable us to to see the humanity of others and to find a small connection. That is the true mission of this peace prize.”
After Holbrooke’s sudden death in 2010, Rab decided to rechristen the lifetime achievement award as the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. “Richard Holbrooke was eloquent and forceful, and this award should be named for him due the very fact that he forged peace with words,” Rab said.
Author and broadcast journalist Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow, noted that her late husband was a man of letters as well as a diplomat: “He was a beautiful writer, and he wrote the definitive diplomatic account of the Dayton Peace Accords, ‘To End A War.’ I miss him in so many ways; he read everything I wrote and made it better. It is so meaningful that Dayton turns out for this award every year. Hats off to Sharon!”
Marton has been more than gracious in her support, often attending the awards ceremony, Rab said: “Kati tells me how much Richard would love this prize, because it was grown from the ground up, and is such a community-supported effort.”
The DLPP website praises its winning writers for “the light they have shown on racism, violence, prejudice, cruelty, and inequity has gone unheeded too long.” Yet some of these same works have joined the growing list of banned books in America.
“There are lots of things you can do, but the one thing you can’t do is to remain quiet,” Rab said.
Holbrooke Award Winner Wil Haygood recently called Rab with the distressing news that his 2021 book “Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World” had been yanked from libraries at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
The Annapolis community rallied around Haygood and other authors, raising $52,000 through a GoFundMe drive to purchase the banned books and offer them free of charge to Naval Academy midshipmen.
“It shows that a concerned citizen can make a real difference in some of these attacks on our civilization, and I do mean civilization, because these are the things that keep us civilized,” Rab observed.
Such deep-rooted community support serves as an affirmation of the philosophy that caused Rab to establish the Dayton Literary Peace Prize – a belief that “words can can advance the cause of peace.”
For his part, Burns is excited to return to Dayton for the 30th anniversary of the peace talks. In addition to accepting the Peace Prize Nov. 16 at the National Air Force Museum, Burns will be speaking with area high school students.
“It’s going to be quite emotional for me to come back on 30th anniversary,” Burns said. “Even in a long career, it’s hard to point to a time when the U.S. stopped a war, stopped the bloodshed, and stopped the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Even today, the Bosnian peace talks are a case study in modern diplomacy that generations of students will continue to learn about. That’s why Dayton has a name in the history books that will never go away.”
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