He won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Gordon Montador Award in 1997 for his book A Place Called Heaven"A Place Called Heaven earns social-issues book prize". Halifax Daily News, May 30, 1997. for the Best Canadian Book on Contemporary Social Issues, the novel “Sleep On, Beloved” was shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Book Prize, and “Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom” (McGill-Queen’s UP 2007), won the 2008 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award by the Canadian Sociology Association.
