In May 2019, Davidson College awarded Dr. Brenda Flanagan the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award, the highest accolade to be bestowed on a professor at the College.
Since 2003 Dr. Flanagan has served as a Cultural Ambassador for the United States Department of State. In 2005, she was the first American writer to be sent on a cultural mission to Libya in 25 years. Her visit opened doors to other American cultural missions. Flanagan has served in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Kuwait, Tajikistan, Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Chad, Panama, India, and the Czech Republic. In addition to lectures on African American, Caribbean, and World Literatures, Flanagan performs her work, and engages in dialogue with citizens, students, professors, creative artists, and journalists in these diverse countries on such subjects as U.S. public policies, diversity, politics and race, and the achievement of success in hostile environments.
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In October, 2020, Dr. Flanagan read excerpts from her prize-winning short story, A Dance With My Brother via Zoom, in the GoViral Literary Festival, in Almaty, Kazakhstan. This piece was included in 9 Stories, a collection of short stories by contemporary American authors translated into Russian by Yuriy Serebryanskiy and Anton Platonov of Literary Translation Laboratory. This project was supported by the U.S. Mission in Kazakhstan.
Mississippi God Damn, an excerpt of her manuscript about the year in which she worked with singer Nina Simone, was published in Ms. Magazine (online) on October 16, 2018. A program staged at Davidson College on October 16th, 2018 called Mississippi God Damn! with accompanying live music can be found on YouTube.
A Dance With My Brother, a short story, won the Canute A. Broadhurst Prize, and appears in The Caribbean Writer, Volume 31 (2017), an issue dedicated to Derek Walcott.