IMPACT Awards 2019

Michael Connelly is the bestselling author of thirty-two novels and one work of non-fiction. With over 70 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. A distinguished graduate (1980) of University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer, first at the Daytona Beach News Journal, followed by the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel. One of the stories he worked on earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He moved to California in 1987 with his wife, St. Petersburg-born Linda McCaleb, whom he met while in college and married in May 1984. In 2001, Connelly left California for Tampa Bay, Florida, together with his wife and daughter, so that they could be closer to their families. His novels still took place in Los Angeles.Shortly after the move to Los Angeles, Connelly began writing his first published novel. The Black Echo (1993). The book is partly based on a true crime and is the first one featuring Connelly’s primary recurring character, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, whom Connelly named after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, known for his paintings full of sin and redemption. The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. Since then, Connelly has won nearly every major award given to mystery writers, including the Anthony Award, Macavity Award, Los Angeles Times Best Mystery/Thriller Award, Shamus Award, Dilys Award, Nero Award, Barry Award, Audie Award, Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière(France), Premio Bancarella Award (Italy), and others.Michael Connelly’s most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Two Kinds of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, and The Black Box. In 2012, The Black Box won the world’s most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing. In 2018 at a ceremony in London the Crime Writers’ Association awarded Connelly with the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honor in British crime writing.In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theaters worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Connelly is the Executive Producer of Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story, a documentary about the late jazz saxophone player, Frank Morgan. He is currently producing a TV series for Amazon Studios called Bosch, based on his novels. It began streaming on Amazon Prime in early 2015, and its 6^th season is currently in production.The NYT #1 best-selling novelist’s newest thriller is Night Fire (October 2019).-           “Dark Sacred Night is one of the best and most affecting Bosch novels since Mr. Connelly began the saga in 1992, underscoring the growing and unsettling ambiguity surrounding its central character.”—Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal–          “Spectacular…Dark Sacred Night is ingenious, frantically suspenseful, and very, very, bleak.”—Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post–          “Michael Connelly is superhuman…His hallmark has been his precise, faultless plotting…Connelly has always been especially good when it comes to truly creepy killers-he was once a crime reporter-and his denouement here is thrilling.”—Charles Finch, USA Today

Kalup Linzy is an internationally recognized multi-faceted performance artist who works across various mediums and disciplines that include video, performance, photography, collage, fashion, television, music, and film.  Linzy’s work is in the public collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem – all in New York City, and the Birmingham Museum of Art (Alabama), and The Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania).  His work has been included in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Prospect.1 New Orleans, 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection, MoMA PS1 Greater New York, At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College.  In addition, he has been featured in exhibitions at the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Berkeley Art Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, amongst others.  He has exhibited extensively internationally, including in Argentina, Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Scotland, South Africa, and Spain.Linzy’s bold and pioneering work, quite unlike any other artist, courageously mines challenging childhood experiences and situations of hardship, class, gender, and race. His gritty, hyperbolic, often theatrical video and performance works and satirical narratives employ a variety of pop cultural forms such as soap operas to thematically explore gender fluidity and boundaries, and cultural identities, with plots calling on socialization and community. With the intention to create videos and performances that are at once comic and poignant, fusing dramatic intensity with melodramatic irony, Linzy serves as writer, director, cinematographer, editor and in a distinctive strategy, voice and overdub the dialogue of multiple characters. He creates characters with extensively mapped backgrounds, layered and linked together with others to form his invented ‘family tree’. He also performs live and creates collages, paintings and photography as these charactersKalup Linzy has been honored with numerous prestigious awards, fellowships and grants, including The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; The Jerome Foundation grant; The Harpo Foundation grant; The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant; The Creative Capital Foundation grant; The Art Matters grant; The Headlands Alumni Award residency; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Art Omi; Fountainhead Residency, Miami; MacDowell Colony Residency; Camargo Foundation Summer Institute, Cassis, France, and others.Linzy has served as professor/visiting artist/visiting lecturer/studio critic at Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, Columbia University, Parsons, School of Visual Arts in New York, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, Phillips Collection and George Washington University, New York University, University of Illinois-Chicago,  The New School-NY,  Chicago Institute, Glassell School of Art-Houston, MICA-Baltimore, University of California-Davis, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Ox-Bow School of Art and Art Residency, and University of South Florida.Linzy is a graduate of University of South Florida Bachelor of Fine Arts (2000) and Master of Fine Arts, Studio Art (2003), and USF Study Abroad Program in Paris, France. He also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002) in Maine.For over a dozen years Linzy’s primary studio was in Brooklyn, New York. Currently he has a studio as a Tulsa Artist Fellow (Oklahoma).  Throughout the years Linzy has maintained strong Tampa Bay ties. He recently curated an exhibition of 15 prominent artists at Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, where he also serves on the board. In 2015, he was one of the artists featured in A Family Affair – the USF Contemporary Art Museum exhibition that highlighted artistic explorations of personal identity and family relationships, as well as broader frameworks of race, class and gender. Linzy was commissioned by USFCAM to create 83 hand-painted photographic collages detailing a fictional family tree, rooted in Stuckey, the historically black community in Central Florida where he grew up. Linzy was also invited by USF Graphicstudio for a collaborative project, working across the artistic platforms of USF’s Institute for Research in Art, and resulting in an archival pigment print edition of himself appearing as one of his more recent performance characters.Linzy has also collaborated with many well-known artists, celebrities, and fashion designers, including James Franco, Jillionaire of Major Lazer, Chloe Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne, Liya Kebede, Leo Fitzpatrick, James Ransone, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Diane von Furstenberg, Proenza Schouler, Michael Stipe, Tunde Adebimpe and the band TV on the Radio. In 2010, he was invited by and featured on General Hospital alongside James Franco playing Kalup Ishmael. Linzy has been featured at Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Outfest.  Kalup Linzy is represented by David Castillo in Miami Beach and The Breeder Gallery in Athens.