Names and faces

■ Chicago’s South Side comes alive through the writings of Gabriel Bump’s debut novel, “Everywhere You Don’t Belong,” which has earned him recognition as the 2020 winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. The nationally acclaimed award, which recognizes outstanding work from Black fiction writers, is in its 14th year and comes with a $15,000 prize given by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. Bump will receive the award in a virtual ceremony Monday. “When I got the call, I spent a couple of minutes making sure they were serious and I wasn’t being pranked,” Bump told The Associated Press. “It’s a surreal moment in another surreal year.” Bump said many of his favorite authors have won the award, including last year’s winner, Bryan Washington. “These are people I really look up to and to be included with them for this recognition is still incredible to me,” Bump said. “Everywhere You Don’t Belong” chronicles the coming-of-age of Claude McKay Love, a young man living with his grandmother in the 1990s. Love deals with typical issues — love, neighborhood violence, peer pressure — as he tries to determine his life’s path and a place to safely “belong.” “Emotionally,” Bump said, “there’s a lot of me in this book. What’s happening to the characters on the inside I pulled from myself and put on the page. But the events surrounding that I wanted to make up into this fantastical weird world.” He said he hopes readers will fall in love with the characters like he did.

■ “Cheer” star Jerry Harris has pleaded innocent to federal child-pornography charges and allegations that he solicited sex from minors at cheerleading competitions and convinced teenage boys to send him obscene photographs and videos of themselves. Harris, 21, of Naperville, Ill., was indicted earlier this month in a seven-count indictment that included the child sex, pornography and other allegations. A complaint filed in September initially charged him with child pornography. In the original complaint, prosecutors said Harris admitted to FBI agents that he asked a teenage boy to send him lewd photographs of himself, but that he requested child pornography from at least 10 to 15 others he knew to be minors via Snapchat. Two of Harris’ alleged victims, who are teenage brothers, have sued Harris in Texas. Harris entered his innocent plea to all seven of the counts on Dec. 17 during an arraignment held by telephone, court records show. Harris remains held without bail at a federal facility in Chicago. He has been held there since his September arrest on child-pornography charges. Harris was the breakout star of the Emmy-winning docuseries that follows a cheerleading team from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas.