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  • Image of Colored Television book cover

    2025 Fiction

    Colored Television

    Danzy Senna

  • Cover of Tremor

    2024 Fiction

    Tremor

    Teju Cole

  • Cover of The Family Chao

    2023 Fiction

    The Family Chao

    Lan Samantha Chang

  • Cover of Horse

    2023 Fiction

    Horse

    Geraldine Brooks

  • Cover of The Trees

    2022 Fiction

    The Trees

    Percival Everett

  • Cover of Deacon King Kong

    2021 Fiction

    Deacon King Kong

    James McBride

    Deacon King Kong […] is robust and funny, confronting tragedy with an ebullient comic spirit, “pulling its punches” in unexpected ways that repudiate disaster and resound just right.

  • Cover of The Old Drift

    2020 Fiction

    The Old Drift

    Namwali Serpell

    My parents speak two different Bantu languages, and even my sister and I speak different languages; so, we all speak to each other in English. We speak Nyanja, Namwanga, Mambwe and Bemba. I tend, when I think in Zambian words, to think in Bemba, not Nyanja.

  • Cover of There There

    2019 Fiction

    There There

    Tommy Orange

    There’s been a lot of reservation literature written. I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other Native people struggle, with identity and authenticity.

  • Cover of Sing, Unburied, Sing

    2018 Fiction

    Sing, Unburied, Sing

    Jesmyn Ward

    Growing up in DeLisle, Mississippi has influenced me in many ways. Growing up here taught me to appreciate beauty, the beauty of the bayous and of the forests and of the Gulf. Growing up in this community taught me to appreciate storytelling, taught me to appreciate language.

  • Cover of The Association of Small Bombs

    2017 Fiction

    The Association of Small Bombs

    Karan Mahajan

    This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world in 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.

  • Cover of The Fortunes

    2017 Fiction

    The Fortunes

    Peter Ho Davies

    ‘The Fortunes’ bends genre and race in ways that make it “a prophetic work in 2017,” according to Joyce Carol Oates.

  • Cover of The Jazz Palace

    2016 Fiction

    The Jazz Palace

    Mary Morris

    Morris is deeply interested in the tensions of home and away, which can be seen in the immigrant and Great Migration characters populating “The Jazz Palace,” both fictional and actual.

  • Cover of A Brief History of Seven Killings

    2015 Fiction

    A Brief History of Seven Killings

    Marlon James

    An epic chorus-in-the-round, with some 30 narrators, each in various patois, telling their story as it intersects with the Singer, as James calls the reggae legend over these 700 pages.

  • Cover of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

    2014 Fiction

    A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

    Anthony Marra

    Marra takes his title from a medical dictionary definition of life and his inspiration, in part, from the fact that no previous English language novel was set in a region that has been fertile soil for Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov and Alexandr Pushkin.

  • Cover of The Yellow Birds

    2013 Fiction

    The Yellow Birds

    Kevin Powers

    Writer Kevin Powers, who joined the Army at age 17 and served as a machine gunner in Iraq, creates a tightly focused, hypnotic story that spirals around his central character’s isolation. Powers has created a piercing portrayal of war.

  • Cover of Kind One

    2013 Fiction

    Kind One

    Laird Hunt

    In understated prose, the story tells of two slave sisters who turn tables on their mistress and take her captive after her Kentucky farmer husband dies.

  • Cover of Half-Blood Blues

    2012 Fiction

    Half-Blood Blues

    Esi Edugyan

    Loyalties were always mixed and the world inside the walls of my home was significantly different from the world beyond it.

  • Cover of Great House

    2011 Fiction

    Great House

    Nicole Krauss

    ‘Great House,’ her third novel, was a finalist for a National Book Award for Fiction, short-listed for the Orange Prize, and featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

  • Cover of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

    2011 Fiction

    The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

    Mary Helen Stefaniak

    A graduate of Marquette University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stefaniak has taught in the Master of Fine Arts programs at Pacific University in Oregon and the University of Nebraska.

  • Cover of Burnt Shadows

    2010 Fiction

    Burnt Shadows

    Kamila Shamsie

    ‘Burnt Shadows,’ her fifth novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction and won the Danish Literature Prize ALOA-2010.

  • Cover of The Plague of Doves

    2009 Fiction

    The Plague of Doves

    Louise Erdrich

    Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.

  • Cover of The Boat

    2009 Fiction

    The Boat

    Nam Le

    Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory […] and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.

  • Cover of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

    2008 Fiction

    The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

    Junot Díaz

    His first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction of 2007, the Mercantile Library Center’s John Sargent Prize for First Novel in 2007, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

  • Cover of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

    2008 Fiction

    The Reluctant Fundamentalist

    Mohsin Hamid

    After September 11, the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, Hamid took a leave of absence from his McKinsey & Company job and returned to Pakistan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and on his second novel, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist.’

  • Cover of Half of a Yellow Sun

    2007 Fiction

    Half of a Yellow Sun

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    Her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” also the title of one of her short stories, is set before and during the Biafran War.

  • Cover of Blue Front

    2007 Fiction

    Blue Front

    Martha Collins

    ‘Blue Front,’ the book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old in Cairo, Illinois, was also chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library and won an Ohioana Book Award.

  • Cover of On Beauty

    2006 Fiction

    On Beauty

    Zadie Smith

    ‘On Beauty’ was recognized with the Orange Prize for Fiction and The Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section). In addition, the novel was short listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2005.

  • Cover of The Dew Breaker

    2005 Fiction

    The Dew Breaker

    Edwidge Danticat

    ‘The Dew Breaker’ is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption.

  • Cover of The Known World

    2004 Fiction

    The Known World

    Edward P. Jones

    Impossible to rush through, “The Known World” is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

  • Cover of The Emperor of Ocean Park

    2003 Fiction

    The Emperor of Ocean Park

    Stephen L. Carter

    Stephen L. Carter has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American politics and culture to the impact of integrity and civility in our daily lives.

  • Cover of World Hotel

    2003 Fiction

    World Hotel

    Reetika Vazirani

    Her awards include a 1999 Pushcart Prize, a 1998 Poets & Writers Exchange Program’s Discovery award, a “Discovery”/The Nation award, fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

  • Cover of John Henry Days

    2002 Fiction

    John Henry Days

    Colson Whitehead

    Smart, learned and soaringly ambitious, his second novel consolidates his position as one of the leading writers of serious fiction of his generation.

  • Cover of A Gesture Life

    2000 Fiction

    A Gesture Life

    Chang-rae Lee

    By exploring his own experiences as a second-generation Korean-born American, Lee’s novels portray the tensions between assimilation into a society and alienation from oneself and one’s heritage. 

  • Cover of Cloudsplitter

    1999 Fiction

    Cloudsplitter

    Russell Banks

    Raised in rural New Hampshire, Banks initially planned to follow his father into the plumbing business; where he grew up, he told an interviewer, ‘the idea of being a writer was like the idea of being a butterfly.’

  • Cover of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

    1998 Fiction

    Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

    Walter Mosley

    Although Mosley’s fiction falls into a category that many consider subliterary—detective fiction—his depth of character, researched historical details, and realistic dialogue transcend the cliches of the genre.

  • Cover of The Autobiography of My Mother

    1997 Fiction

    The Autobiography of My Mother

    Jamaica Kincaid

    The experience of losing one’s birth mother becomes a metaphor for the detachment from one’s mother country. The novel is a chilling and tight monologue, a haunting expression of the protagonist’s isolation.

  • Cover of All Souls’ Rising

    1996 Fiction

    All Souls’ Rising

    Madison Smartt Bell

    Bell dips into the chaos like a colonial Bret Easton Ellis, providing us all the details with an almost deviant relish. It’s only when the noble slave Touissant Louverture takes control of the African mob that a bit of civility returns to the war-torn country.

  • Cover of Sweetbitter

    1995 Fiction

    Sweetbitter

    Reginald Gibbons

    Timely in the subject of interracial love, this authentic, richly detailed novel plumbs sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one’s identity, bringing the anguish of the two young lovers to life.

  • Cover of The Latin Deli

    1994 Fiction

    The Latin Deli

    Judith Ortiz Cofer

    Her stories celebrate, mourn, and honor Latinas, collectively and individually, and also consider the influential men in her own life: the author’s beloved, unknowable, philandering father; the first boy she loved; her heartbreakingly deteriorating grandfather.

  • Cover of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

    1993 Fiction

    Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

    Sandra Cisneros

    Her work delves into the unheralded inner lives of women through chronicles of migration, urban dislocation and deprivation in borderland arroyos and urban barrios. Cisneros captures the deepest existential concerns and struggles of women.

  • Cover of The Women of Plums

    1990 Fiction

    The Women of Plums

    Dolores Kendrick

    Told in an earthy and uncontrived dialect, these memorable poems offer, not remote, idealized victims, but American black women of the 19th century making folksong poetry out of a terrible destiny: to be denied freedom, dignity, and humanity.

  • Cover of A Sport of Nature

    1988 Fiction

    A Sport of Nature

    Nadine Gordimer

    In her novels and short stories Gordimer has captured the “flesh and blood of individual behavior” in minute and sentient detail, chronicling daily life in South Africa under apartheid, and portraying the human face of resistance.

  • Cover of Beloved

    1988 Fiction

    Beloved

    Toni Morrison

    Above all, Morrison is known for her rich, lyrical prose, which fuses the rhythms and imagery of African American speech and music with other literary influences to create a discourse of its own.

  • Cover of Mouroir

    1985 Fiction

    Mouroir

    Breyten Breytenbach

    An Orphic voyage into memory and mirage, through passages between death and life, darkness and light, oppression and flight, sense and the sensed.

  • Cover of In the Mecca

    1969 Fiction

    In the Mecca

    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Brooks created a unique poetic voice that grappled with issues of art, identity, race, gender, and the relation between literature and popular culture.

  • Cover of The Forbidden Man

    1962 Fiction

    The Forbidden Man

    Gina Allen

  • Cover of Simple Takes a Wife

    1954 Fiction

    Simple Takes a Wife

    Langston Hughes

    As a poet, playwright, fiction writer, autobiographer, and anthologist, Hughes captured the moods and rhythms of the black communities he knew and loved—and translated those rhythms to the printed page.

  • Cover of The Wall

    1951 Fiction

    The Wall

    John Hersey

    John Richard Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage.

  • Cover of Cry, the Beloved Country

    1949 Fiction

    Cry, the Beloved Country

    Alan Paton

    When his first novel, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” was published in 1948, the reviews hailed it as ‘beautiful and profoundly moving […] steeped in sadness and grief but radiant with hope and compassion.’

  • Cover of The Other Room

    1948 Fiction

    The Other Room

    Worth Tuttle Hedden

    It is one of the best—and earliest—views of breaking the color line as well as a touching love story of a man and woman of different races.

  • Cover of East River

    1947 Fiction

    East River

    Sholem Asch

    By writing in the language of all Jews about everyday Jewish life, Sholem Asch, along with other pioneers of Yiddish literature, sought to preserve a sense of culture and community among his kinsmen despite their dispersal throughout the world and lack of a common homeland.

  • Cover of Earth and High Heaven

    1945 Fiction

    Earth and High Heaven

    Gwethalyn Graham

    With rare perceptiveness, Gwethalyn Graham takes the reader into the lives of Erica Drake and Marc Reiser, whose two worlds are separated by families and conventions. Here is the story of a man and woman who dared earth and high heaven to make their vision real.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. 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. Presented by the Cleveland Foundation, it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.

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