Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope, has been met with national acclaim, landing on best books of 2025 lists by major publications and earning nominations for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. This month, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation will award Franklin the 19th annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. The award honors the late Ernest Gaines, whose stories amplified and inspired the voices of Black people living in rural America.

“I’m thrilled to receive this award and endlessly grateful to the judges’ panel and to the Gaines family for their support of my work,” Franklin notes in a press release. “Ernest J. Gaines’s legacy of creativity, chronicling Black American life and fostering the next generation of young writers is an immense inspiration, and I’m honored to be a part of it.”

Great Black Hope follows Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate in turmoil after an arrest. The fictional work explores race, class and addiction through the lens of an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Smith. His dizzying journey is a coming-of-age in a new era. Set amid a dangerous nightlife circuit and police investigations, it is a gripping tale of coexisting in different worlds and finding hope throughout it all.

Franklin will receive the Ernest J. Gaines Award, which includes $15,000 to support the continuation of his craft, at the annual award ceremony at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts on October 30.

Great Black Hope is available anywhere books are sold. Learn more about Franklin at robert-michael-franklin.com