Winners

James McBride has worn a porkpie hat, a goatee and a wry smile on his way to becoming a celebrated artist, Spike Lee collaborator and a National Humanities Medalist. President…

The novelist, literary critic and short story writer Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia 16 years after her country threw off colonial rule. She is the daughter of a British-born…

The novelist Tommy Orange grew up in a city – Oakland, California – as the majority of Native American people do. “We know the sound of the freeway better than…

The novels of Jesmyn Ward create a fictional place – Bois Sauvage – rooted in her rural hometown on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The vividness of Bois Sauvage and…

Karan Mahajan was born in Stamford, Connecticut and grew up in New Delhi. When he was 12, Kashmiri separatists set off a car bomb in a market a few miles…

Peter Ho Davies grew up in Coventry, England, the son of a Welsh engineer and a Malaysian Chinese dentist. It’s a soccer saturated place, and Sook Ying Davies remembers carrying…

Mary Morris was born in Chicago in 1947, and although she left to study at Tufts University and settled in the east, her hometown tie remained. Now a professor of…

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…

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 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…

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…

Nicole Krauss’ fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories. She is best known for her novel, The History of Love (2005), which won the…

Wisconsin native Mary Helen Stefaniak grew up in what she refers to as a “bicultural household”: Her father was from Milwaukee, her mother from Gordon, Georgia. Stefaniak’s first novel, The…

Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani novelist, was born into a literary family. Her mother is a critic and short-story writer, her grandmother was a memoirist, and her great-aunt, a novelist and…

Erdrich’s 13th novel, a multi-generational tour de force of sin, redemption, murder and vengeance, finds its roots in the 1911 slaughter of a farming family near Pluto, North Dakota. The…

From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le’s accomplished debut. In Halflead…

Junot Díaz’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Best American Short Stories. His critically praised bestselling debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion…

Mohsin Hamid was born in Lahore, Pakistan. After completing his schooling in Pakistan, Hamid attended Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie. While the family’s ancestral…

Martha Collins is the recently retired Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and one of the editors of FIELD magazine and an editor of Oberlin College Press….

Zadie Smith was born in northwest London and continues to live in the area. Her first novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000 and won the Guardian First Book Award,…

In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, the prolific Edwidge Danticat spins a series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals…

In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who…

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…

Reetika Vazirani is the author of White Elephants (Beacon, 1996) selected by Marilyn Hacker for a Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She was educated at Wellesley College and the University…

Although he just published his second novel, Colson Whitehead is already a highly decorated author. His latest work, John Henry Days, received several distinguished literary awards, including the 2002 Young…

Author of two award-winning novels, Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee believes that “a good story is a journey of the mind, not a record of fact.”  Lee regards writing as a…

One of America’s most uncompromising novelists, Russell Banks received the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1999 for Cloudsplitter, a book about the abolitionist John Brown. Narrated by Brown’s son Owen, the novel…

Walter Mosley was born to an African American father and a Jewish mother in South Central Los Angeles, where he lived until he left for college in Vermont. After college…

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, and as a child was greatly influenced by her mother, Annie Richards. At sixteen years of age, after successfully completing a British education…

It might at first seem a strange move for Madison Smartt Bell (author of Soldier’s Joy, Zero db, and Save Me, Joe Louis) to abandon his milieu of disturbed drifters…

Gibbons’s first novel takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule-not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white…

Poet and novelist Ortiz Cofer offers her readers an affecting view of Puerto Rican New York in this autobiographical assortment of essays and poems. Her stories celebrate, mourn, and honor…

Mexican American writer, poet, and ardent feminist, Sandra Cisneros writes stories that are seldom heard in mainstream America-those of the diverse experiences of Hispanic women in contemporary urban society. Her…

With an eloquence that exemplifies the beauty of the spiritual, Kendrick creates 34 black slave women who relate lives of appalling deprivation in lyrical monologues. Told in an earthy and…

“I have come to the abstractions of politics through the flesh and blood of individual behavior. I didn’t know what politics was about until I saw it all happening to…

“I’m interested in how men are educated, how women relate to each other, how we are able to love, how we balance political and personal forces, who survives in certain…

Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea…

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. As an infant she moved with her parents, David and Keziah Wims Brooks, to the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, where she has…

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — And then run? …Maybe it just sags like…

This book 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 of Polish…

A white South African of British descent, Alan Paton wrote what is considered one of the great African novels in English. His mother was a teacher and his father was…

This prize-winning novel is about a young woman who unknowingly signs up to teach classes at an all-black college in New Orleans in 1920. It is one of the best—and…

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…

Winner of the 1944 Governor General’s Literary Award For Fiction. Earth and High Heaven is, simply, a drama of human relationships—of two people in love who are confronted by the…