This year our jury selected 11 incredible books as finalists for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Learn more about this year’s finalists with descriptions from their publishers before we announce our winners on April 15.
Death Does Not End At The Sea by Gbenga Adesina University of Nebraska Press, 2025
In Gbenga Adesina’s groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history—a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin—to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of an American City by Bench Ansfield W.W. Norton & Company, 2025
The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s—and its legacy today.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color.
Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.
Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks.
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza Catapult, 2025
A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.
Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance by A’Lelia Bundles Simon & Schuster, Scribner Books (Imprint) 2025
A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker—daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance—written by her great-granddaughter.
Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker and the author’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance.
After inheriting her mother’s hair care enterprise, A’Lelia would become America’s first high profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-a-terre—where she entertained Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties.
Now, based on extensive research and Walker’s personal correspondence, her great-granddaughter creates a meticulous, nuanced portrait of a charismatic woman struggling to define herself as a wife, mother, and businesswoman outside her famous mother’s sphere. In Joy Goddess, A’Lelia’s radiant personality and impresario instincts—at the center of a vast, artistic social world where she flourished as a fashion trendsetter and international traveler—are brought to vivid and unforgettable life.
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che Simon & Schuster, Atria Books/Washington Square Press (imprint), 2025
The long-awaited second poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut, Split, Becoming Ghost details the lives of refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and were utilized as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. This poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of centering Vietnamese voices. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about power, art, and the meaning of forgiveness.
Flashlight by Susan Choi Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025
A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?
Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history.
A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
Jailbreak of Sparrows by Martín Espada Tin House, 2025
The poems in Jailbreak of Sparrows reveal the ways in which the ordinary becomes monumental: family portraits, politically charged reports, and tributes to the unsung. Espada’s focus ranges from the bombardment of his family’s hometown in Puerto Rico amid an anti-colonial uprising to the murder of a Mexican man by police in California, from the poet’s adolescent brawl on a basketball court over martyred baseball hero Roberto Clemente to his unorthodox methods of representing undocumented migrants as a tenant lawyer. We also encounter “love songs” to the poet’s wife from a series of unexpected voices: a bat with vertigo, the polar bear mascot for a minor league ballclub, a disembodied head in a jar.
Jailbreak of Sparrows is a collection of arresting poems that roots itself in the image, the musicality of language, and the depth of human experience. “Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say,” the poet says about his father, a photographer who documented his Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and beyond. The poems of Martín Espada tell us: Look.
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French W.W. Norton & Company, Liveright Publishing (Imprint) 2025
The Second Emancipation, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild’s contention that French is a “modern-day Copernicus.” The title—referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom—positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.
That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” Determined to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story,” The Second Emancipation begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French’s consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah’s early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu—including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him “one of the greatest political leaders of our century”—and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.
Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana’s first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah’s radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.
In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, The Second Emancipation becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus HarperCollins, Ecco (imprint), 2025
A vibrant debut story collection masterfully moving between sharp wit and profound tenderness, and a kaleidoscopic portrait of an ever-changing country.
Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simon, the patron saint of alcohol and cigarettes, the characters in Guatemalan Rhapsody find themselves at defining moments in their lives, where sacrifices may be required of them, by them, or for them.
In “Saint Dismas,” four orphaned brothers pose as part of a construction crew, stopping cars along the highway and robbing anyone stupid enough foolish enough to hit the brakes. In “Heart Sleeves,” two wannabe tattoo artists take part in a contest, where one of them hopes to win not only first place but also the heart of his best friend’s girlfriend. And, in “Fight Sounds,” a character who fancies himself a Don Juan is swept up in the commotion of an American film crew shooting a movie in his tiny town, until the economic and sexual politics of the place are turned on their heads.
Guatemalan Rhapsody explores how we journey from the circumstances that forge us and whether the ability to change our fortunes lies in our own hands or in those of another. Revealing the places where beauty, desperation, love, violence, and hope exist simultaneously, Jared Lemus’s poignant, unflinching debut establishes him as a major new voice in the form.
Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore Tin House, 2025
In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess who falls for a new church member wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate.
Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present—and how our present choices will echo for years to come.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy Simon & Schuster, Scribner Books (Imprint) 2025
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
Keep track of your progress and make your predictions for the winning titles using our Finalist Checklist!
CLEVELAND – [March 3, 2026] – The Cleveland Foundation announced 11 finalists for the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), marking 91 years of honoring literature that contributes to our understanding of race and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.
Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza
Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance by A’Lelia Bundles
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Jailbreak of Sparrows by Martín Espada
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French
The finalists were chosen by the AWBA jury, led by Pulitzer Prize winning author, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and 2021 Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction winner Natasha Trethewey. Trethewey is joined by a jury of prominent scholars and writers: esteemed AWBA-winning novelist Peter Ho Davies; bestselling AWBA-winning writer and scholar Charles King; AWBA-winning writer and American historian Tiya Miles; and critically acclaimed author Luis Alberto Urrea. The selection process reflects the award’s deep commitment to literary excellence and social relevance.
“These 11 titles represent bold innovation in the literary arts and the breadth of human diversity,” said Trethewey. “Through a mix of seasoned and debut writers, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury celebrates the courage, urgency, and prescience of each author as they write towards freedom.”
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has advanced several strategic initiatives in the last year, including an historic prize increase, signaling an evolution from its place among the country’s most revered literary honors into a cultural force that actively shapes national discourse, advances enduring values, and influences public thought.
Last year’s decision to announce finalists for the award marked a meaningful departure from past practice, elevating more of these exceptional authors and bringing their work to a wider audience. In 2025, AWBA also tripled the cash prize to $30,000 in each of its four categories—fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry—reflecting a deepened commitment to supporting authors whose work challenges injustice and expands our understanding of race, culture, and identity.
For the first time in prize history, the winners will be announced in New York City on April 15. The winners will also be honored at the upcoming annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony and awards weekend this fall in Cleveland.
“The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are making monumental strides to invest in the authors of our times–these are authors whose literary works will fundamentally shape how we see and understand race and diversity for years to come,” said Kortney Morrow, director of the Awards. “We’ve tripled the cash prize to $30K each, built a literary festival, and are presenting a new canon of writers that are committed to rigorous historical excavation all in search of truth and freedom.”
Founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, AWBA remains the only national endowed juried prize recognizing books that contribute to our understanding of race and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity. Past winners include Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Isabel Wilkerson, and Colson Whitehead—writers whose work has shaped discourse on race and identity.
Anisfield Wolf was a quiet but fearless change maker who recognized the power of literature.
“Edith believed in the power of words to move our hearts and in its capacity to confront injustice, challenge systems, and expand our understanding of one another. That is why she permanently endowed this prize.” said The Cleveland Foundation CEO Lillian Kuri. “This year’s finalists have penned courageous texts in the pursuit of a more just world – and it’s our job to steward Edith’s legacy by pouring into their artistic process and amplifying their works to new audiences and new heights.”
About the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of race and human diversity. Established in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the awards are the only national endowed juried prize for literature that explores race and celebrates diversity. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are administered by the Cleveland Foundation. For more information follow us on Facebook, X, Threads, and Instagram.
About the Cleveland Foundation Established in 1914, the Cleveland Foundation is the world’s first community foundation – and one of the largest today. Through the generosity of donors, the foundation improves the lives of residents of Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties by building community endowment, addressing needs through grantmaking and providing leadership on vital issues. Our vision is a vibrant Northeast Ohio where no Clevelander is left behind. For more information, visit ClevelandFoundation.org and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Explore thoughtful book discussion questions, exclusive author content, and thoughts on the winning books from AWBA program director, jurors and partners each month through our Anisfield-Wolf Book Club!
February’s Selection: 2025 Poetry Winner, Yard Show, by Janice N. Harrington
As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show is a collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity.
Whether you are hosting your next book club or would simply like some questions to guide your reading, program director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Kortney Morrow, has curated a selection of questions to consider while you read Yard Show.
Did you enjoy reading Yard Show? If so, we recommend the following books to add to your reading list!
The Warmth of Other Suns (2011 AWBA Winner), Isabel Wilkerson
Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, Tiya Miles
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, Brian McCammack
Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, Brea Baker
Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens, Vaughn Sills
Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, Terrion L. Williamson
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Program Director Kortney Morrow joined AWBA winner Namwali Serpell for a discussion of Serpell’s new book, On Morrison, at The City Club of Cleveland on Feb. 20.
The conversation included a close reading of a passage from Morrison’s novel Paradise, as well as a deep dive into her artistry and technique.
The event is part of a yearlong celebration of Morrison’s life, literature and legacy.
Explore thoughtful book discussion questions, exclusive author content, and thoughts on the winning books from AWBA program director, jurors and partners each month through our Anisfield-Wolf Book Club!
January’s Selection: 2025 Memoir Winner, Feeding Ghosts, by Tessa Hulls
Tessa Hulls’ graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, is a compendious multi-generational epic combining a sweeping history of twentieth century China with an intimate, extraordinary family story. Stories indeed – our most precious inheritance – lie at the heart of this remarkable volume: the gnawing need to tell them and the hunger to hear them.
While you read Tessa Hulls’ award-winning memoir, Feeding Ghosts, take a listen to our curated playlist of songs inspired by cowboys, travel, nomads, and more!
Whether you are hosting your next book club or would simply like some questions to guide your reading, program director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Kortney Morrow, has curated a selection of questions to consider while you read Feeding Ghosts.
Did you enjoy reading Feeding Ghosts? If so, we recommend the following memoirs, graphic novels, and stories to add to your reading list!
Memorial Drive (2021 AWBA Winner), Natasha Trethewey
The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui
The Woman Warrior (1978 AWBA Winner), Maxine Hong Kingston
How to Not be Afraid of Everything, Jane Wong
The Fortunes (AWBA Winner 2017), Peter Ho Davies
Some of the world’s most powerful stories honored by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have leapt from the page to the screen. With over 262 prizes awarded since 1935, over 15 of these exceptional works have been adapted for the screen!
Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the 2016 movie follows the true story of three African American women (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe) who worked for NASA as ‘human computers’ at the Langley Research Centre.
The 2017 documentary considers how children and their families cope with deafness, autism, dwarfism, and several other identities that challenge society’s definition of ‘normal.’
The 2017 movie, The Yellow Birds, starring Alden Ehrenreich, Tye Sheridan, and Jennifer Aniston, pivots on the last weeks of friendship between 18-year-old Private Daniel Murphy and 21-year-old Private John Bartle, who makes a rash promise to Mrs. Murphy to bring her son home safely from Iraq.
“The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a 2012 movie based on Hamid’s novel, follows a young Pakistani man whose American dream unravels in the wake of 9/11, forcing him to confront questions of identity and belonging. The film stars Riz Ahmed alongside Kate Hudson and Kiefer Sutherland.
The 2013 film centers on the lives of two sisters raised in privilege, Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) and Olanna (Thandie Newton). We meet them on the cusp of the civil war and follow shifts in the complex relationships the sisters share with one another, their lovers, and, ultimately, their sense of nation.
The Emperor of Ocean Park is a 2024 television series based on Stephen L. Carter’s 2003 novel of the same name. Starring Forest Whitaker, Tiffany Mack, Grantham Coleman, and Paulina Bugembe, the show follows Talcott Garland, whose tranquil existence is upended by the death of his father. Mariah Denton, a former journalist and ardent conspiracy theorist, questions the manner of his death and thinks he was the victim of foul play.
2004’s Oscar Award Winning, Million Dollar Baby starring Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood is based on a short story from Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner. The film follows Margaret “Maggie” Fitzgerald (Swank), an underdog amateur boxer who is helped by an underappreciated boxing trainer (Eastwood) to achieve her dream of becoming a professional.
The 1998 movie of the same name starring Laurence Fishburne, Natalie Cole, Laurie Metcalf, Bill Cobbs, and Cicely Tyson, follows a former prisoner as he tries to save a neighborhood child from following him down the wrong path.
“Beloved,” released in 1998, is the film adaptation of Morrison’s AWBA and Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover and Thandiwe Newton, the story follows a mother who is haunted by her enslaved past.
Simple Justice is the definitive history of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education and the epic struggle for racial equality in this country. The 1993 movie starring Giancarlo Esposito, James Avery, Andrew Braugher, and Peter Francis James, explores this case in its entirety.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) sold more than five million copies and changed the nation’s opinion of the black nationalist leader. This Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Winning biography was the inspiration for the 1992 Spike Lee movie, Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington.
A Many-Splendored Thing (1952) describes Han Suyin’s tragic love affair with a British newspaper correspondent in the context of military and social conflict and also explores problems of bicultural parentage. This book served as the inspiration for the 1955 film, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.
Alfred A. Knopf’s, The Wall, is the story of the Warsaw ghetto from November 1939 to May 1943 told by means of a fictional diary kept by Noach Levinson, self-appointed archivist. This book inspired the 1982 film starring Tom Conti.
Alan Paton’s award-winning book follows a Zulu priest who travels to Johannesburg from the countryside in search of his sister and his son. In 1995, a movie adaptation starring James Earl Jones and Richard Harris brought this work to live on the big screen.
Explore thoughtful book discussion questions, exclusive author content, and thoughts on the winning books from AWBA program director, jurors and partners each month through our Anisfield-Wolf Book Club!
December’s Selection: 2025 Nonfiction Winner, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, A True Story of Slavery, A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography, John Swanson Jacobs, Edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder
A stunning achievement of autobiographical writing, political commentary, historical sleuthing, and critical interpretation. Originally written and published by the abolitionist and sailor John Swanson Jacobs in 1855, the memoir was rediscovered and republished by the literary scholar Jonathan Schroeder in 2024.
Book Discussion QuestionsWhether you are hosting your next book club or would simply like some questions to guide your reading, program director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Kortney Morrow, has curated a selection of questions to consider while you read The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.
Did you enjoy reading The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots? If so, we recommend the following books to add to your reading list!
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
David Walker’s Appeal, David Walker
We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson
Magnumb, Arthur Jafa
Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman
Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown
Are you looking for the perfect gift for the readers on your list? Look no further! We have compiled a list of some of our favorite Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winning titles for every reader, from fiction fans to history lovers, there is something in the AWBA canon for everyone!
The New-to-AWBA Explorer
People who want an approachable starting place—accessible reads that open the door to the canon.
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey (AWBA Nonfiction 2021):
In this sublime memoir, our Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury chair reckons with the murder of her mother at the hands of her stepfather. The poetic prose will grip you as Trethewey masterfully revisits the deeply segregated South, miscegenation laws, and the life she built in the wake of trauma.
As the first graphic novel to win an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, this text is perfect for the reader who values a visual story.Former AWBA winner and current AWBA juror Peter Ho Davies writes, “Tessa Hulls’ graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, is a compendious multi-generational epic combining a sweeping history of twentieth century China with an intimate, extraordinary family story. Feeding Ghosts crosses oceans, continents and decades to make whole a family, restore a home and as readers we are privileged to join a journey told in such richly expressive images and vivid prose.”
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (AWBA Nonfiction 2011):
Through narrative storytelling, Wilkerson writes a definitive account of the Great Migration—a period in history when six million Black citizens migrated from the South to the North and the West in search of greater opportunity. Wilkerson’s masterwork sheds light on a six-decade period of “unrecognized immigration” within the United States, documenting a legacy of citizens who left home to follow their dreams.
The one who says, “just one more chapter,” stays up way too late, and always needs another great read queued up.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna (AWBA Fiction 2025):
This satirical novel follows Jane Gibson, a middle-aged writer whose latest book project “her mulatto War and Peace” never makes it to market and puts her tenure-track into question. Desperately seeking economic stability for her family, she descends into the underbelly of Hollywood. This page-turning text is full of Jane’s questionable decisions, unexpected plot twists, and Senna’s brilliant commentary on race and class in a post-post-racial America.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride (AWBA Fiction 2021):
If an elderly deacon marching out of a housing project in South Brooklyn and shooting the most ruthless drug dealer in the first paragraph doesn’t get you to binge read this novel, I’m not sure what will. McBride weaves humor and gripping prose to create a portrait of a working-class neighborhood grappling with poverty, compassion, and faith.
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (AWBA Fiction 2017):
Mahajan’s second novel starts with Chapter 0—the detonation of a bomb in the Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi. This explosive beginning is followed by a riveting account of the aftershocks of a terrorist attack. Written in third person, Mahajan writes with psychological empathy for both the victims and the perpetrators, complicating our understanding of violence and sympathy. Read this before his third novel comes out in March 2026.
Looks for literature that illuminates injustice, elevates marginalized voices, and inspires action.
“A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (AWBA Nonfiction 2003):
In this groundbreaking text now over 20 years old, Power analyzed U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century to explain the repeated failure to act in the face of genocide. Documenting the U.S.’ position in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and beyond, Power’s text questions pragmatism in the face of atrocity. The perfect choice for a social justice seeker grappling with contemporary questions around genocide, U.S involvement, foreign policy, and morality.
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young (AWBA Nonfiction 2018):
“Bunk is an essential book. It unpacks myriad hoaxes embedded in American history, from Spiritualism to the fake news espoused by Donald Trump. As Kevin Young explores these hoaxes, he finds that there is darkness at the heart of our country, a malignant seed, that finds expression in fakery. Young writes with humor and wit, and during this moment when alternative facts are sanctioned and willful ignorance is celebrated, this is a necessary read.” – Jesmyn Ward on Bunk
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (AWBA Poetry 2020):
Kaminsky’s second poetry collection is set in an occupied territory during a time of political unrest. In the first poem of Act One, a solider shoots and kills a young deaf boy and it renders the entire town deaf. This 76-page urgent elegy lifts a mirror up to our collective silences in the face of atrocity and forces us to face what it means to live in a peaceful country.
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman (AWBA Nonfiction 2016):
Faderman’s archival research and 150+ first-person interviews resulted in her 2016 landmark text—The Gay Revolution. Starting from the 1950s when the law classified gays, lesbians, and trans people as criminals and working her way up to the fight for marriage equality under Obama’s presidency, Faderman documents the gay-rights movement. As the ACLU tracks 616 anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States as of September 2025, revisiting this text and filling in the ten-year gap between the time of its publication might be critical to understanding where we came from and where we’re heading in the fight for gay rights.
For readers who love literature that transports them across cultures, borders, and identities.
Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka (AWBA Nonfiction 1983):
In 1986, Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature making him the first African laureate. Three years prior, the first installment of his memoir, Aké, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction. Here, Soyinka documents his childhood living in a Yoruba village in western Nigeria from ages 4-11. Pick up this text for a chance to experience pre-World Word II Nigeria from a curious and always-questioning child-eye’s view.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (AWBA Fiction 2020):
Serpell’s debut novel, which took nearly two decades to craft, centers on a fateful 1904 incident near the Old Drift, a colonial settlement on the Zambezi River just a few miles from Victoria Falls. In the aftermath of this tragic incident, Serpell follows three generations as they collide over the course of a century. Former Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards juror Rita Dove writes, “The Old Drift” is “a phenomenal accomplishment, nothing less than a retelling/reimagining of the creation and ‘history’ of Zambia. The writing is exquisite; her descriptions of water – Victoria Falls, Lake Malawi, even rain – are awesome.”
If you’re looking for a single book to take you around the world, look no further than The Boat by Nam Le. Le’s debut is a collection of seven different short stories set in Colombia, Japan, Iran, Australia and the United States. Spanning different points of view and different time periods, think of each short story as a trip to a new place. On each stop you’ll meet new characters, each faced with an urgent threshold they must cross over.
Drawn to narratives—fiction or nonfiction—that uncover untold truths, cultural histories, or lived experience.
The US Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder (AWBA Nonfiction 2025):
In this groundbreaking text,Schroeder uncovered the 1855 first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—in an Australian newspaper. Reproduced in full, this narrative, written by an ex-slave and ex-American, inserts a new 19th century global slave narrative. In the second half of the book, Schroeder writes a full biography on Jacobs’ life, adding context by an esteemed literary historian.
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (AWBA Nonfiction 2017):
Shetterly’s debut novel tells the story of four black women mathematicians working at NASA beginning in 1948. Their calculations during the Space Race era allowed the country to successfully send astronauts into orbit, to the moon and back. “The title of the book is something of a misnomer,” Shetterly writes in her acknowledgements. “The history that has come together in these pages wasn’t so much hidden as unseen—fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes and family anecdotes and musty folders.”
Horse is for the historical fiction fans. When Brooks’ learned that the Smithsonian had recently received a donation of the skeleton remains of the 19th century thoroughbred horse Lexington, she was intrigued. She would go on to uncover the critical role Black horseman played in building the thoroughbred industry. This novel is the story of that legendary Pre-Civil War racehorse, Lexington, and his Black groomer, Jarret. Not only does Brooks paint a picture of race relations at the cusp of national division, she brings the legacy of enslavement into the modern day with a contemporary storyline that makes you question just how far we’ve come.
Explore thoughtful book discussion questions, exclusive author content, and thoughts on the winning books from AWBA program director, jurors and partners each month through our Anisfield-Wolf Book Club!
Whether you are hosting your next book club or would simply like some questions to guide your reading, program director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Kortney Morrow, has curated a selection of questions to consider while you read Colored Television.
Did you like Colored Television? If so, we recommend the following books to add to your reading list!
Caucasia, Danzy Senna
Come and Get It, Kiley Reid
Audition, Katie Kitamura
Swing Time, Zadie Smith
The Black Notebooks, Toi Derricotte
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), the only national juried prize for literature that addresses racism and diversity, proudly marks its 90th anniversary with a citywide celebration September 19–20, 2025. The anniversary weekend will bring award-winning authors to Cleveland for a series of thought-provoking conversations and readings that honor nine decades of Anisfield-Wolf awardees—writers who shaped our understanding of race, culture, and identity.
“As we mark the 90th anniversary of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, we celebrate not only this year’s remarkable winners but also the enduring vision of Edith Anisfield Wolf,” said Kortney Morrow, Program Director, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. “This milestone year brings together past and present voices in a dynamic new setting—designed to spark urgent conversations and honor a legacy that continues to expand how we see, understand, and shape the world around us.”
Founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards remain a critical force in the literary world. For nine decades, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have set the intellectual table for conversations on race and cultural differences. Past winners include Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Isabel Wilkerson, and Colson Whitehead— writers whose work has shaped discourse on race and identity.
Anisfield Wolf, who died in 1963, asked the Cleveland Foundation in a bequest to sustain her passion and vision for the awards for the “purpose of stimulating the writing of more and better books upon the general subject of race relations.” The Cleveland Foundation continues to steward the awards today.
“For nine decades, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have championed literature that confronts injustice and sparks critical, consequential conversations about our world and humanity,” said AWBA jury chair Natasha Trethewey, poet, memoirist, and Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. “It is a profound honor to celebrate this year’s winners and the extraordinary legacy of the awards during its 90th anniversary weekend – at a time when these voices are more important than ever.”
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are part of Cleveland Book Fest, a month-long showcase of literary excellence in Northeast Ohio.
Friday, September 19: City Club of Cleveland Forum and the 90th Anniversary Awards Ceremony
The weekend begins with a special City Club of Cleveland Friday Forum at 11:30 a.m. featuring literary scholars Jonathan D. S. Schroeder(AWBA 2025) and Vincent Brown (AWBA 2021) in conversation on Rediscovering Resistance: John Swanson Jacobs and 600,000 Despots. The forum will be held at the City Club of Cleveland (1317 Euclid Ave.) and is open to the public ($30 members / $45 nonmembers).
That evening, the 90th Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony will take place at the Maltz Performing Arts Center (1855 Ansel Rd.) beginning at 6:30 p.m. A public reception with book signings, food, and drinks will follow at the Ballroom at Park Lane.
Saturday, September 20: The 90th Anniversary Celebration – Events Free and Open to the Public
Morning: Author Panels and Community Conversations
The celebration continues Saturday morning at the Cleveland Public Library’s MLK Jr. Branch with two dynamic panels. Doors open at 9 a.m.
Humanity on the Line: Resisting Dehumanization, Erasure, and Atrocity Amidst Divides (9:45 a.m.): A fireside chat with George Makari(AWBA 2022) and David Livingstone Smith (AWBA 2012)
Light in the Ruins: A Poetry Reading Featuring Past Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winners (10:30 a.m.): A poetry reading featuring Adrian Matejka (AWBA 2014), Ilya Kaminsky (AWBA 2020), Victoria Chang (AWBA 2021), Monica Youn (AWBA 2024), and Marilyn Chin (AWBA 2015)
Book sales and signings will follow, hosted by Mac’s Backs. Featured canon members as well as AWBA jurors – Natasha Trethewey (AWBA 2021), Peter Ho Davies (AWBA 2017), Charles King (AWBA 2020), Tiya Miles (AWBA 2022), Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea – will be available.
Afternoon: Author In-Community Events
Spend the afternoon in Ohio City with a series of intimate, author-led conversations and performances that bring literature into the heart of the community. Each event is hosted in a unique neighborhood venue, offering attendees the chance to engage with award-winning writers in relaxed, creative settings. Events are all within walking distance.
Central Hub: Bookhouse Brewing
Enjoy discounted food and drinks, browse signed books, and connect with fellow attendees between sessions.
Beyond Representation: Fiction that Moves, Challenges and Illuminates the Complexity of Identity. Guests will enjoy a lively conversation about how narrative driven fiction infused with humor can challenge the way we see ourselves and the world around us.
2:00–2:45 PM | Transformer Station | Tessa Hulls (AWBA 2025) x Maxine Hong Kingston (AWBA Lifetime Achievement 2024)
Drawn from Memory: The Role of Art in Shaping Identity Moderated by author Peter Ho Davies (AWBA 2017). Tessa Hulls’ visual panels will be projected on the gallery walls, enriching the experience.
3:00–3:45 PM | St. John’s Episcopal Church | Jonathan D. S. Schroeder (AWBA 2025) x Karamu House Revival: A Slave Narrative Reawakened In partnership with Karamu House, actors will perform dramatic readings from the 1855 slave narrative of John Swanson Jacobs, reinterpreted through a modern lens.
4:00–4:45 PM | Ohio City Farm | Janice N. Harrington (AWBA 2025)
Yard Show: Poetry of Belonging, Nature, and Black Creative Placemaking Guests will enjoy a live poetry reading, reflections on the cultural and ecological significance of Black creative placemaking, and guided tours of the grounds.
All events are free unless otherwise noted. For more information and to receive event updates, visit Anisfield-Wolf.org.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. Established in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the awards are the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and celebrates diversity. The Anisfield-Wolf Book awards are administered by the Cleveland Foundation. For more information, visit Anisfield-Wolf.org, and follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Cleveland Book Week has been transformed into Cleveland Book Fest, a month-long showcase of literary excellence in Northeast Ohio. This year’s festival is slated to draw in thousands of book lovers, writers, and residents through author talks, poetic-inspired exhibits, dynamic readings, writing workshops, and publishing panels.
Cleveland Book Fest Schedule
Rock & Read: Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo
Tuesday, Sept. 3 | 6 p.m.
Cleveland Public Library Martin Luther King Jr. Branch
Join us for a rockin’ family event celebrating My Grandma and Grandpa Rock! by legendary duo Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo. Enjoy a lively discussion moderated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s own Dr. Jason Hanley. Presented in partnership with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Sourcebooks Publishing and Loganberry Books.
Free copies of the book to the first 300 attendees.
Cleveland Public Library Martin Luther King Jr. Branch
Hosted by Lake Erie Ink, Writers in Residence, CHARP EDucation and Sparrows Fortune
This FREE event is open to all teens, in grades 7th-12th in the Greater Cleveland community, and will include local guest poets, pizza, giveaways of books and other cool stuff. Teens will write in response to prompts and share work in an open mic. If you’re a teen, stop in and do some writing, sharing and listening. If you’re an adult, stop in and listen to what Cleveland teens have to say.
Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Writing Conference is the largest free writing conference in the country. Three days of virtual events Sept. 8-10 with nationally renowned authors lead to a two-day in-person conference Sept. 12-13 featuring 40 events and 80 authors at the Cleveland Public Library. The in-person conference includes writing workshops, craft talks, panel discussions, an open mic, a book fair with regional literary presses and organizations, plus a keynote by bestselling author and Cleveland native Celeste Ng. All free!
Drawn Together: Jewish Women and Graphic Novels A Conversation with Terri Libeson, Sara Phoebe Miller, and Samantha Baskind
Wednesday, Sept. 17 | 7 p.m.
Mishkan Or 26000 Shaker Blvd, Beachwood, OH 44122
Step into the world of graphic novels with creators Terri Libenson and Sara Phoebe Miller and art history professor Samantha Baskind. In this lively conversation, they’ll discuss the power of combining images and words, the influence of Jewishness, and connecting with readers through storytelling.
Terri Libenson is the creator of The Pajama Diaries and the best-selling middle-grade graphic novel series Emmie & Friends (book 9, Entirely Emmie, appeared earlier this year).
Sara Phoebe Miller is the author of the young adult graphic novel You Belong Here. After working at DC Comics for more than a decade, she recently became the Editorial Director at BOOM! Studios.
Samantha Baskind is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University. She co-edited the landmark book The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches and is the author of six books on Jewish art and artists, including the forthcoming Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor. She also serves on the board of the Siegel and Shuster Society.
Join The City Club in learning from two Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners, Jonathan D. S. Schroeder and Vincent Brown, as they discuss the importance of amplifying hidden narratives and what uncovering stories of resistance can teach us about today.
The Nature of Our Times – Exhibit Opening and Poetry Reading
Friday, Sept. 19 | 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Cleveland Public Library (Main)
Join us for a special opening event and poetry reading for the exhibit, The Nature of Our Times at Cleveland Public Library, featuring Ohio poets and coeditors Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto, and David Hassler and Phillip Levin, director of United By Nature.
Published by Paloma Press in collaboration with the Wick Poetry Center and Poets for Science, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders is a companion to the United By Nature Initiative, a first-of-its-kind, national assessment of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife.
The annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony returns to the Maltz Performing Arts Center for a fourth consecutive year to honor the 2025 winners as they join the esteemed canon of America’s only juried book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. A reception, book sale and author signing will follow the ceremony. Tickets are free but registration is required. A livestream option will be available for those who cannot attend in person.
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards 90th Anniversary Celebration
Saturday, Sept. 20 | 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
AWBA author panels, book signings and in-community events at the Cleveland Public Library – Martin Luther King Jr. Branch in the morning and various venues across Ohio City in the afternoon.
Samin is a cook, teacher, and author of the James Beard award-winning cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. She was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and Chef of the Year by Eater. She is the co-host of the Home Cooking podcast and host of the Netflix original documentary series based on her book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
Author Jill Lepore will discuss her latest book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.
Each ticket ($35 +fees) includes a seat at the author’s talk, a copy of We the People, and a donation to the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States.
Cuyahoga County Public Library South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch
Join us for the book launch event for Dan Chaon’s One of Us.
Dan Chaon is the author of several books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller that was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake, a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O. Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Chaon lives in Cleveland.
John Scalzi is one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain. Material from his blog, Whatever, has earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.
Marie Vibbert at the Cuyahoga County Public Library
Thursday, Sept. 25 | 7-8 p.m.
Cuyahoga County Public Library South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch
Local author Marie Vibbert visits to discuss her latest novel, Andrei and the Hellcats.
Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author Marie Vibbert’s short fiction has appeared over 90 times in top magazines like Nature, Analog, and Clarkesworld, and been translated into Czech, Chinese and Vietnamese. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long listed by the British Science Fiction Award and her work has been called “everything science fiction should be” by the Oxford Culture Review. She also writes poetry, comics, and computer games. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland.
Ian McEwan’s literary works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. His first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. McEwan was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times before winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel, Atonement, received the WH Smith Literary Award in 2002 and was made into an Oscar-winning film featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His new book, What We Can Know, will be published on September 18, 2025. Single tickets go on sale Wednesday, September 3rd.
Cleveland Public Library Martin Luther King Jr. Branch
The Eighth Annual Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC, pronounced “glossy”) features a nationally renowned author, Diane McKinney-Whetstone (the Langston Hughes Literary Keynote), and Kim Martin-Sadler (the Alice Dunbar Nelson Professional Keynote), a publishing industry expert, to share insights with authors and aspiring writers throughout the region. Accompanied by in-depth panel discussions, opportunities to network with esteemed literary minds, and be equipped with trending literary tactics, this event is a must-attend for all literary creatives and lovers of African American literature.
Join us for our annual day-long conference where Black literary creatives are celebrated and highlighted for their work in Cleveland and beyond. Learn from influential publishing industry professionals to obtain and enhance your writing objectives.
Save the date for Saturday, Sept. 27 from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Public Library-MLK Branch! While this event is free and open to the public, Ms. McKinney-Whetsone’s latest novel, Family Spirit, will be available for purchase as a bundled ticket. Do take advantage of the bundled ticket and secure Ms. McKinney-Whetsone’s autograph during her book signing.
Also, on Friday, Sept. 26., GLAAWC, in partnership with the Case Western Reserve University English Department and the Baker-Nord Center, will host the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award honoring Cleveland’s own beloved and distinguished poet, Julie Patton. Additional details forthcoming.
Mark your calendars for a distinguished weekend of literature and camaraderie in celebration of the 90th Anniversary of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. This two-day festival-style celebration will feature intimate conversations between past AWBA winners, jury and author book signings, and in-community author events showcasing the AWBA Class of 2025.
2025 Awards Ceremony
Sept. 19, 6:30 p.m.
Maltz Performing Arts Center
Tickets will be available to reserve later this summer.
90th Anniversary Celebration
Sept. 20, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
AWBA author panels, book signings and in-community events at the Cleveland Public Library – Martin Luther King Jr. Branch and various venues across Ohio City
Full schedule forthcoming – watch our social channels and website for updates.
CLEVELAND — Four groundbreaking works have been named winners of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the nation’s only endowed juried prize dedicated to literature that deepens our understanding of race and diversity.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury, chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, selected this year’s distinguished group of winners:
Fiction:Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Nonfiction:The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography by John Swanson Jacobs, edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder
Memoir:Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
Poetry:Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will also receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing his profound impact on American literature. Known for his lyrical explorations of war, memory, and race, Komunyakaa has shaped contemporary poetry with a voice that is both unflinching and deeply evocative.
Founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards remain a critical force in the literary world. Past winners include Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Isabel Wilkerson, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead — writers whose work has shaped discourse on race and identity in America.
Anisfield Wolf, who died in 1963, asked the Cleveland Foundation in a bequest to sustain her passion and vision for the awards for the “purpose of stimulating the writing of more and better books upon the general subject of race relations.” The Cleveland Foundation continues to steward the awards today.
“For 90 years, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have championed fearless, groundbreaking literature that challenges the status quo, ignites dialogue, and shapes a more just and inclusive world,” said Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation. “This year’s winners unearth buried histories, redefine cultural narratives, and demand our attention — at a moment when these voices are more vital than ever.”
A Landmark Win for the Graphic Memoir Genre
For the first time in its 90-year history, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have honored a graphic memoir: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls.
Through stunning visuals and powerful storytelling, Hulls unearths her family’s multigenerational journey from China to America, confronting trauma, migration, and resilience in a format that redefines the boundaries of memoir.
A Prize with National and Global Impact
Now in its 90th year, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards continue to elevate authors whose work ignites national and global conversations on identity, history, and justice.
“This year’s winners add new dimensions to the Anisfield-Wolf legacy,” said jury chair Trethewey. “From a rediscovered first-person slave narrative to a searing portrait of modern racial identity, these books demand to be read and discussed.”
Trethewey is joined on the jury by esteemed AWBA-winning novelist Peter Ho Davies; bestselling AWBA-winning writer and scholar Charles King; AWBA-winning writer and American historian Tiya Miles; and critically acclaimed author and National Book Awards finalist Deesha Philyaw.
The 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony will take place September 19 in Cleveland — honoring the winners in a celebration of literature’s power to confront the past and shape the future. This event will be part of multi-week celebration of books, literature and writing in Cleveland with other local literary partners. Additional details will be announced soon.
CLEVELAND – The Cleveland Foundation announced 10 finalists for the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), marking 90 years of honoring literature that confronts racism and explores diversity.
The announcement of finalists marks an expansion from past practice. In previous years, only the winning books have been revealed for categories that include fiction, nonfiction, poetry and lifetime achievement.
“Every year, the hardest part of our job as judges is choosing the winners from a finalist pool of incredible and compelling books,” says Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer-Prize winning author and chair of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury, which considered more than 300 submissions this year. “The decision to share the finalists allows us to lift up the important works of more of these talented authors to a broader audience.”
Founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, AWBA remains the only national endowed juried prize recognizing books that contribute to our understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity.
Anisfield Wolf, who died in 1963, asked the Cleveland Foundation in a bequest to sustain her passion and vision for the awards for the “purpose of stimulating the writing of more and better books upon the general subject of race relations.” The Cleveland Foundation continues to steward the awards today.
This year’s extraordinary finalists span fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir/autobiography, reflecting the richness and complexity of the global conversation on identity, history and justice:
Janice Harrington, Yard Show
Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts
John Swanson Jacobs/edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography
Sarah Lewis, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You Is the Sea
Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
Kiley Reid, Come and Get It
Danzy Senna, Colored Television
Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
Danez Smith, Bluff
“Art is such a powerful tool—it inspires us, challenges us and leads us to ask the critical questions that drive society in the direction of its best self,” says Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation. “For 90 years, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have amplified voices in pursuit of a more just and inclusive world, not only in literature but in life.”
The finalist list of 10 titles was chosen by the 2025 AWBA jury. Trethewey is joined by esteemed AWBA-winning novelist Peter Ho Davies; bestselling AWBA-winning writer and scholar Charles King; AWBA-winning writer and American historian Tiya Miles; and National Book Award finalist Deesha Philyaw. The selection process reflects the award’s deep commitment to literary excellence and social relevance.
“This year’s finalists embody the Anisfield-Wolf legacy of fearless writing that compels us to reckon with history and reimagine the future,” says Trethewey. “These books are urgent, profound and necessary.”
The winners will be announced on April 10 at the William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage Series presented by the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation and its academic partner Case Western Reserve University in the Maltz Performing Arts Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Tommy Orange, former AWBA winner for his 2018 debut novel, There There, will announce the winners following a conversation with fellow writer Kaveh Akbar. Live stream (and limited in-person) tickets are available at writerscenterstage.org.
The winners will also be honored at the upcoming annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony this fall in Cleveland.
About the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. Established in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the awards are the only national endowed juried prize for literature that confronts racism and celebrates diversity. The Anisfield-Wolf Book awards are administered by the Cleveland Foundation.
About the Cleveland Foundation Established in 1914, the Cleveland Foundation is the world’s first community foundation – and one of the largest today. Through the generosity of donors, the foundation improves the lives of residents of Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties by building community endowment, addressing needs through grantmaking and providing leadership on vital issues. Our vision is a vibrant Northeast Ohio where no Clevelander is left behind. For more information, visit ClevelandFoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
CLEVELAND – Cleveland Book Week is underway, with a full schedule of far-ranging programs that are nearly all free to the community.
Cleveland Book Week is a series of literary events presented by the Cleveland Foundation and community partners, including Literary Cleveland, Cleveland Public Library, and the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference.
The year’s events are anchored by the 89th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards – the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and celebrates human diversity – featuring 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA) winners and renowned authors Ned Blackhawk, Teju Cole, Monica Youn and Maxine Hong Kingston.
NEW this year, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards will host a community symposium bringing together AWBA winning authors and jurors at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 28 at The City Club of Cleveland. When Artists Go to Work: The 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Author Symposium will spotlight these powerful literary voices ` and offer unique insights and perspectives into their work and the legacy of the awards.
Book prize welcomes new jurors and new category; sets October 16 deadline for submissions
Cleveland, OH – The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards – the only juried American book awards focused on works that address racism and diversity – have announced several updates for the 2025 award year, including the introduction of three new jurors and a new memoir and autobiography category.
The book awards, administered by the Cleveland Foundation, were established in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf to reflect her family’s passion for issues of social justice. The recipients of the 2024 awards were announced in March.
Welcoming new jurors:
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have announced the addition of three distinguished authors to its jury: Charles King, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea. These esteemed writers bring a wealth of experience and accolades to the panel.
Charles Kingis the author of the New York Times-bestselling Gods of the Upper Air, which received the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His work has also been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times History Prize and the British Academy’s Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Deesha Philyaw, celebrated for her debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Her collection also won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction23.
Luis Alberto Urreais a prolific author and a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction. His numerous accolades include the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Edgar Award. Urrea’s works, such as The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter, have garnered critical acclaim and widespread recognition.
King, Philyaw, and Urrea join returning jurors Natasha Tretheway (chair), Peter Ho Davies, and Tiya Miles.
New memoir/autobiography category:
“Memoir and autobiography” has been added as a fourth category for submissions, beginning with this year’s awards. The full list of categories includes fiction, poetry, memoir/autobiography and general nonfiction. To be eligible for the awards, books must contribute to our understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity. Books must be written in English and published and copyrighted in 2024 to be eligible for the 2025 prize.
Digital submission process and deadline:
This year, all submissions will be accepted digitally, streamlining the process for authors and publishers. For books published and copyrighted in 2024, the submission period will end on October 16, 2024.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, presented by the Cleveland Foundation, today announced the winners of the 89th annual awards. The 2024 recipients of the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and explores diversity are:
“It is a great pleasure to recognize this year’s winners, who have used their unique voices and experiences to spark critical conversations,” said jury chair Natasha Trethewey, poet, memoirist and Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. “This class joins past recipients, who include literary luminaries and contemporary thought leaders, in leveraging the power of words to explore and confront some of the most challenging topics facing us today.”
Trethewey, a 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for non-fiction, received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007 and served as the nation’s 19th poet laureate from 2012-2014.
Members of the Anisfield-Wolf jury — Trethewey, Rita Dove, Peter Ho Davies, Tiya Miles and Steven Pinker — salute the new class. Watch the video below as they welcome the newest additions to the Anisfield-Wolf canon.
“This year’s winners join an Anisfield-Wolf canon of literature that has challenged the way that we think and inspired action in individuals around the world,” said Nicholas Roman Lewis, director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
This year’s award winners are among more than 260 recipients of the prize. Past winners include seven writers who won Nobel prizes – Ralph J. Bunche, Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Gunnar Myrdal, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott.
Nicholas Roman Lewis has joined the Cleveland Foundation as the Director of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Lewis, who has served as a literary agent and entertainment attorney, as well as an alumni relations leader at Yale University, will focus on increasing the visibility and impact of the Awards locally, nationally, and internationally.
The 2024 winners will be announced at a March 26 event with author and 2022 AWBA fiction winner Percival Everett, in partnership with the Cuyahoga County Public Library. The event is free and open to the public.
Lewis joins the Cleveland Foundation from Yale University, where he served as senior director for shared interest and identity groups for the Yale Alumni Association. He has also served as a literary agent for authors of several books, including “Ghetto Nation,” “A Love Noire,” “Darker Still,” Leanna Renee Hieber’s “The Eterna Files,” as well as award-winning author Cora Daniels and John Jackson’s “Impolite Conversations.” In addition, Lewis has worked as an attorney in the fields of theater, television, music, and film.
“Nicholas comes to the Foundation with unique and robust experience in publishing, entertainment and community engagement, as well as a successful history in building strong relationships across a diverse range of stakeholder groups,” said Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation. “We are fortunate to welcome such a talented leader as we look to further elevate the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards while preserving its long-standing heritage.”
An Ohio native, Lewis received his Juris Doctorate from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Yale University.
“I am thrilled for the opportunity to build on the important work started by Edith Anisfield Wolf nearly 90 years ago,” said Lewis. “I believe in the power of literature to drive the conversation on social justice and look forward to expanding the reach of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards nationally and beyond.”
As previously announced, Karen R. Long will retire after an impactful 11 years leading the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Prior to her role with AWBA, Long spent an impressive 34-year career at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, including as book editor. She will remain with the Cleveland Foundation as a consultant through July 2024.
Updates to Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Jury
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards welcomed several new jurors for 2024, as three jurors retired after years of dedication to AWBA, including long-time jury chair Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Retiring jurors:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., literary critic and professor, Harvard University
Joyce Carol Oates, novelist, Princeton University
Simon Schama, historian and professor, Columbia University
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury for 2024 is comprised of five award-winning authors and leaders in the literary and academic fields.
Natasha Trethewey, poet and memoirist, Northwestern University (jury chair)
Peter Ho Davies, novelist, University of Michigan
Tiya Miles, historian, Harvard University
Rita Dove, poet, University of Virginia (returning juror)
Steven Pinker, psychologist Harvard University (returning juror)
The eighth annual Cleveland Book Week brought five literary powerhouses — poet Saeed Jones, historian Matthew F. Delmont, novelists Geraldine Brooks and Lan Samantha Chang and lifetime achievement winner Charlayne Hunter-Gault — to unique venues all across the city.
Our in-person programming was facilitated by our partnerships with Karamu House, Dunham Tavern Gardens & Museum, Cleveland Police Mounted Unit, Asia Plaza, East Technical High School and the City Club of Cleveland.
Watch all of this year’s programming below, in full:
2023 Ceremony Highlights
Saeed Jones at Karamu House
Saeed Jones‘ second poetry collection, “Alive at the End of the World,” contains 46 poems in a book Rita Dove calls “an aching reminder that a queer Black man leads a meta existence; he cannot live without thinking about living, constantly negotiating the everyday with an eye to the peril that can intrude at any time, from police violence to the minutest reactions from highbrow bigots.”
Geraldine Brooks at Dunham Tavern Museum & Gardens
Anisfield-Wolf Juror Joyce Carol Oates said Geraldine Brooks’ “Horse” was “a truly poignant tale and very richly developed.” Juror Rita Dove called it beautifully written: “I have nothing but praise for her evocative descriptions of Black jockeys and trainers.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault at The City Club of Cleveland
Charlayne Hunter-Gault first made history in 1961 when she desegregated the University of Georgia after she mounted a successful legal challenge that granted her admission. In 1963, the Georgia governor declared her marriage to University of Georgia classmate Walter L. Stovall, who was white, “a shame and disgrace.” The state’s Attorney General even threatened prosecution.
Charlayne has worked for The New Yorker, The New York Times, PBS, NPR, and CNN. She has received multiple awards, including an Emmy and Peabody for her distinguished work covering the Apartheid at PBS NewsHour. In her latest book, My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives, Charlayne chronicles her lifelong commitment to reporting on Black people in their totality, from the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Barack Obama, and beyond.
Lan Samantha Chang at Asia Plaza
Joyce Carol Oates called Lan Samantha Chang’s novel “The Family Chao”: “an outstanding work of fiction,” saying she had read nothing else of late as ambitious or accomplished. Rita Dove enjoyed the book’s multi-faceted nature.
Matthew F. Delmont at East Tech High School
Anisfield-Wolf Juror Steven Pinker praised Matthew F. Delmont’s “Half American” as a “book heroically researched, rich in historical detail, well organized and written. This will probably stand as the landmark treatment for years to come.”
by Charles Ellenbogen
Ray Carney has a problem any parent will recognize. The protagonist of “Crook Manifesto” – the second in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy — has a daughter, May, craving tickets to the Jackson 5 concert, which is sold out. Carney, a once part-time crook trying to become a full-time furniture salesman, still has connections and taps into them in exchange for a promise of concert tickets. He agrees to do a favor and, as any casual reader of crime novels can predict, this leads him into a much more tangled and serious situation than he anticipated.
Those seeking an innovative plot are better served by Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys” (both won Pulitzer Prizes) or “John Henry Days,” which earned an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award more than 20 years ago.
Instead, “Harlem Shuffle” rewards readers with its language, character, setting, and commentary.
Of New York City (the very definitely a character), Whitehead writes in an Algrenesque style, “City like this, it behooves you to embrace the fucking contradictions.” Note the absence of the “In a” and the contradiction within the statement about contradictions; the same person uses the word ‘behooves’ and a profanity in one breath.
The camera doesn’t just stay on Carney, though. Whitehead places Pepper center stage in the second section of the novel. We first meet him when he’s working security: “His technique: glaring with his arms loosely crossed; lifting a skeptical eyebrow when civilians got too close to the perimeter; the occasional grunt to warn someone off. He was a six-foot frown molded by black magic into human form. It sufficed.”
This novel makes brilliant use of short phrases and punctuation. Consider those final two words “It sufficed.” The reader falls into rooting for Pepper. What places this novel squarely in the five-star ranks, though, is Whitehead’s commentary. While many crime novels might incidentally have a comment to offer about the wealthy class in Los Angeles, Whitehead’s trilogy is, in the end, a loving and critical history of Harlem. On the surface, each of the three sections of this story are centered around an historical event – the last, in 1976, is infused with New York’s celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. The upcoming holiday sets Carney scrambling for an advertising tie-in. One possibility? “Two hundred years of getting away with it.” Neither Carney nor Whitehead need to define “it.” It’s in the city’s and the nation’s DNA.
Based on “Harlem Shuffle” and “Crook Manifesto,” Whitehead seems to be aligned with James Baldwin, who wrote, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
The corruption, the fires, the neglect, the architecture, the poor, the wealthy, the music, the food, the police, the criminals and the furniture – Whitehead sees them all as intertwined, all as part of the problem, as part of the legend. People, mostly white though sometimes Black, keep finding ways to profit off Harlem. As the city struggles with bankruptcy, even Hollywood finds a way to make money off people like Ray Carney. Just as he can’t stay away from his criminal past, none of the city’s elements can disentangle. It seems Carney and Whitehead wouldn’t want it any other way.
The ending, though, will leave you wondering how Carney will respond to New York in the upcoming third novel.
Open and challenge your mind with the latest news from Anisfield-Wolf
