“Gordon Parks Choice of Weapons Award” 2026 Recipients

                    

Victor Goines and Maryemma Graham will be the recipients of the “Gordon Parks Choice of Weapons Award” at the annual celebration October 1st - 3rd, 2026 in Fort Scott, Kansas. The celebration is in honor of Fort Scott native Gordon Parks, noted photographer, writer, musician, and filmmaker. The Choice of Weapons Award was established in Parks’ honor to be given annually at the celebration. More detailed information about the annual celebration events will be coming at a later date with a full press release. 

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Victor Goines is an internationally acclaimed saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and educator with a career that spans over four decades at the highest levels of jazz performance and education. A native of New Orleans, Goines began his musical journey at a young age and has become one of the most respected figures in jazz. During his lengthy tenure as a member of both the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Septet, he has performed on major stages around the world and contributed to numerous recordings, including Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Blood on the Fields” and Ted Nash’s Grammy-winning “Presidential Suite.”

 

Goines is also a prolific composer, having created more than 400 original works. Many of  these compositions have been commissioned by prestigious institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Juilliard School, the Woodlawn Cemetery and Conservancy, the Music Institute of Chicago, and the ASCAP Foundation. His extensive discography includes performances as both a leader and a sideman, collaborating with legends like Eric Clapton, Dianne Reeves, Ellis Marsalis,Branford Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, Wycliffe Gordon, and Ruth Brown, among others. In addition to his performance career, Goines has made a significant impact in the field of music education. He served as the Director of Jazz Studies at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music for 14 years, during which time he elevated the program to national recognition. Prior to that, he was the founding Director of Jazz Studies at The Juilliard School, where he shaped the curriculum that established Juilliard as a premier institution for jazz education. Goines has mentored notable artists including Jon Batiste, Aaron Diehl, Brian Blade, and Yasushi Nakamura. He has also held teaching positions at Florida A&M University, the University of New Orleans, Loyola University New Orleans, and Xavier University.

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Goines earned a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Loyola University New Orleans and a Master of Music degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Music Arts in music education at Boston University.

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His last appointment was as the President and CEO of Jazz St. Louis from 2022 until his departure 
in 2026.

Victor L. Goines is a Yamaha artist and a Vandoren artist.

 

 

 

 

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Maryemma Graham Is University Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Department of English, University of Kansas, and a 2021 recipient of an American Book Award lifetime achievement recognition for “outstanding literary excellence,” highlighting the broad and lasting impact of her research, publishing, teaching, and public engagement through humanities-driven initiatives. The Augusta, Georgia, native is founder and for 38 of its 43 years, the director of The History of 
Black Writing (HBW), a digital archive established in 1983, at the University of Mississippi. Focusing on the preservation and study of Black Literature. HBW is best known for its wide array of 
initiatives in the humanities that have redefined the field of literary studies. Graham’s extensive record of funding includes over $3.5 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford, and Mellon Foundations. HBW’s signature work links literary recovery, archival preservation, and digital scholarship with intergenerational and international networks.

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Spearheaded by HBW, Graham created a bridge for the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, the Language Matters Teaching Initiative in partnership with the Toni Morrison Society, and the Black Book Interactive Project, a joint effort with AFRO-PWW at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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AFRO-PWW is now an active digital publishing network led by Marilyn Thomas Houston and Ronald W. Bailey just as HBW began a new era at Indiana University under the leadership of Ayesha Hardison. 

 

Graham’s research and publications – 15 books and hundreds of articles and essays – point to her national and international focus as a scholar-activist-collaborater invested in expanding the public’s knowledge. Her notable published works include The Cambridge History of African American Literature, with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. and the multi-lingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire / Beyond the Visible and Ordinary (2015) with Andrée-Anne Kekeh and Janis A. Mayes.  On her groundbreaking, late career  publication, The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (Oxford, 2022), Alice Walker comments that Graham “invites us to understand more fully the richness and variety of Southern life . . . the unstoppable spirit of black creative people. . . and the Universe of Margaret Walker . . . who never stopped honing her skills of inquiry, observation, and debate.”  

Largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in Margaret Walker, prior to the biography, Graham published 4 related books: How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990), On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-92 (1997), Conversations with Margaret Walker (2002), and Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, originally published in 2001 & reprinted due to popular demand in 2014. While Graham’s investment  in Walker has defined much of her career, her reputation is extended with articles, book \chapters, introductions, interviews, commemorative editions, book reviews, study guides, and especially interviews. Graham landed the first major interview with the late novelist Frank Yerby, one of the most widely published American novelists of his time, whom most did not know was black.

 

Her mentorship of legions of students and initiating collaborative projects are widely known, and Graham remains highly invested in advocacy efforts, just as she redefined what we mean by “professional development” with her 20 popular NEH-funded programs, including national summer institutes at Northeastern University in Boston and the University of Kansas. KU hosted 16 of these events that reached educators throughout the US and abroad. The kick off for these events was the 2002 Langston Hughes Centennial that brought more than a 1000 people to Lawrence. 

 

In her so-called retirement, Graham is working on three books: “The Cambridge History of the African American Novel,” with Keith Gilyard (Cambridge), “Margaret Walker’s South” (University Press of Mississippi), and “The Gary Girls” with the members of her maternal family. Somewhere in there will be her own memoir, “School Teacher’s Daughter.” Born and raised in Augusta, GA, Graham calls Lawrence, KS her home after nearly 30 years as a resident. Driven by a concern that reading has gone out of style, she is working with the St. Luke A.M.E. church community and its Pastor Rachel Williams-Glenn in building a children’s library, commemorating the church and the city, where famous author Langston Hughes spent his childhood.
 

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Schedule and ticket information will be posted at a later date

on the website gordonparkscenter.org.

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      WE ARE LOOKNG FORWARD TO SEEING EVERYONE AT THIS YEARS' CELEBRATION!