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As the Canadian-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, Esi Edugyan grew up between worlds. “Loyalties were always mixed,” she said, “and the world inside the walls of my home was significantly…

David Blight is a professor of history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His newest book, American Oracle:…

David Livingstone Smith is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, where he teaches on the philosophies of biology, ethics, metaphysics, mind, psychology, and…

It is surprising to note that Arnold Rampersad, one of our nation’s premier biographers, was born and raised outside the country. “Growing up as a schoolboy in Trinidad, I received…

Wole Soyinka, winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, is a Nigerian playwright, poet, essayist, and profile in courage. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986,…

Far From the Tree is a magisterial book from Andrew Solomon that parses diversity in its most intimate setting: the family. Solomon considers how parents navigate the world when a…

The year it won, My Favorite Warlord won for Fiction. With the addition of the Poetry category in 2015, we have retroactively added this title to the Poetry category. Eugene…

The Yellow Birds is a scalding first book that 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…

Laird Hunt is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. Kind One, a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner for fiction, is a haunting novel that explores…

Anthony Marra was born in Washington, D.C. At 19, he worked full-time in a UPS office before enrolling at the University of Southern California, where he received his bachelor’s of…

The year it won, The Big Smoke won for Fiction. With the addition of the Poetry category in 2015, we have retroactively added this title to the Poetry category. Adrian…

Ari Shavit is a commentator on Israeli public television and a leading columnist for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Born in Israel, Shavit served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense…

Sir Theodore Wilson Harris is a celebrated Guyanese writer and a visionary explorer of the interdependence among history, landscape and humanity. Born to an insurance agent and his wife, Harris…

George Lamming is an illustrious Caribbean novelist, poet and cultural critic from Barbados. He was just 23 and living in London when he wrote “In the Castle of My Skin.”…

Marilyn Chin was born Mei Ling Chin in Hong Kong. Her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where her father transliterated her name to Marilyn, the subject of her biting, funny…

Jericho Brown was born Nelson Demery III, raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University in New Orleans. He worked as a speech writer to the…

David Brion Davis is a leading American intellectual and cultural historian, the author or editor of 16 books. Anisfield-Wolf-winning historian Ira Berlin observed that “no scholar has played a larger…

Richard S. Dunn is a professor emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and directed the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He was born…

Marlon James was born in 1970 in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a police detective and her lawyer husband. James credits his mother’s perceptiveness in the volatile decade after his…

Lillian Faderman, a leading scholar of LGBT history, writes that she exists because her unmarried mother Mary, a Jewish garment worker in lower Manhattan, had the gumption to refuse a…