Discover their stories.
Highlights from the 2022 Awards Ceremony
Our Mission
The only juried American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. For 86 years, the distinguished books earning Anisfield-Wolf prizes have opened and challenged our minds. Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book awards in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for social justice.
Proudly presented by the Cleveland Foundation
Recent News
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7 Titles From AW-Winning Authors You’ll Want On Your TBR List
January 24, 2023
Looking for some new titles to pick up? Check out some recent releases from Anisfield-Wolf award winners – you already…
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Watch the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Awards Documentary
November 7, 2022
For the third year, our literary celebrations continue with a one-hour awards documentary featuring our 2022 winners: Percival Everett (fiction), Donika Kelly (poetry), George Makari (nonfiction), Tiya…
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7th Annual Cleveland Book Week, Cover to Cover
October 6, 2022
Book lovers gathered in person for the first time since 2019 to celebrate Cleveland Book Week this fall, with a…
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Anisfield-Wolf Fellow Valentino Zullo is Shaping the Future through Comics
August 31, 2022
“Fantasy drives us all,” declares Professor Valentino L. Zullo, the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Post-Doctoral Fellow in English and Public Humanities at…
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7th Annual Cleveland Book Week Kicks Off September 9
August 3, 2022
Since 2016, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have hosted Cleveland Book Week, to celebrate its past and present winners and showcase…
Educational Resources
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The Music of Tommy Orange’s There There
Book: There There
Level: Child -
Teaching Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
Book: Bunk
Level: Young Adult -
Teaching Diversity in the Eras of Plague and Pandemic
Book: Far From the Tree
Level: Young Adult -
Reading Anisfield-Wolf Winners’ Picture Books
Level: Child
Join the conversation on Twitter
@AnisfieldWolf#AWBAxBHM || Jesmyn Ward, 45, writes to tell the truth or, “so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important as theirs.” She won the AW prize in 2018 for “Sing Unburied Sing.” https://t.co/W0C8aZznNJ

#AWBAxBHM || A. Van Jordan (’05) won the Anisfield-Wolf prize for M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A, telling the story of MacNolia Cox, a 13yo Black girl who was the first to advance to the final round of the national Spelling Bee. Hear more from Jordan on #TheAsterisk: https://t.co/MwcFyrK2gs https://t.co/uVYh7kHbcd
In King’s words, it was “the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.”
Did you know #MLK is an @AnisfieldWolf Book Awards winner? Martin Luther King Jr’s first book, his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf prize for nonfiction in 1959. #AWBAxBHM https://t.co/8GILwcOa7A

This beautiful tote was handmade in #Cleveland by @clevelandsews for our @NEHgov @NEH_Education summer institute: Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Rust Belt. Which @beltpub @AnisfieldWolf books should we fill them with? Apply by 3/3 at https://t.co/aA2GcZ1Iky #rustbeltlab https://t.co/ZPEDaTu8tR
