The Atlanta Opera has announced that composer Dave Ragland and librettist Selda Sahin have been named the winners of their second annual 96-Hour Opera Project.

The challenge saw a number of teams stage new, 10-minute operas over the course of four days. Ragland and Sahin’s work, “Steele Roots,” follows Carrie Steele Logan, 19^th-Century Black Woman whose legacy of serving orphans continues to this day through the Carrie Steele-Pitts Home in Atlanta.

Ragland and Sahin will receive a $10k Antinori Foundation Grand Prize, as well as a commission from TAO to write a chamber opera. The jury selected as runner-up “Faces in the Flames” by composer Nathan Felix and librettist Anita Gonzalez, which centers on the life of Black photographer Thomas Askew.

“With such talented participants, the judges had quite a challenge choosing our winners,”said Tomer Zvulun, Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. General & Artistic Director of The Atlanta Opera, in an official press statement. “These creators brought us words with both poetry and humor paired with musical scores in a variety of styles. These premieres were a real joy to witness.”