The acclaimed actor, producer, and television veteran to serve as master of ceremonies for the 2019 National Book Awards
The National Book Foundation announced that LeVar Burton, acclaimed actor and entertainment industry professional, will host the 70th National Book Awards on November 20, 2019 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Burton, who is known around the world as Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge in the iconic Star Trek: The Next Generation television and film series, and as the host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow, will serve as master of ceremonies for the event that will announce the National Book Awards Winners in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. The ceremony will also include the presentation of two lifetime achievement awards, to Oren J. Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association and pioneering writer Edmund White.
In addition to announcing the winners of the National Book Awards, the benefit dinner on November 20 serves to fund the educational and programming work of the National Book Foundation year-round.
ABOUT LEVAR BURTON
LeVar Burton launched his acting career while still a student at the University of Southern California. Cast in the groundbreaking role of Kunta Kinte in the landmark television series Roots, at 19 he found himself on the cover of TIME magazine. A seemingly impossible act to follow, Burton managed to do so in dramatic fashion, achieving further global acclaim as Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge in the iconic Star Trek: The Next Generation television series and in feature films. However, it has been his role as host and executive producer of the beloved PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow of which he is most proud. Airing from 1983 to 2009, it was not only one of the longest-running children’s television shows in history, but also one of the most acclaimed, earning over 200 awards including multiple Emmys and a Peabody.
Always committed to improving children’s education through innovative uses of storytelling, in 2012 Burton launched RRKidz, a digital educational publishing company. In a deal that ended in August 2017, his company held the global rights to the Reading Rainbow brand through a partnership with series creator, WNED/Buffalo. That partnership resulted in a successful relaunch of the Reading Rainbow brand for a new generation of children. Skybrary is a digital reading service filled with over 500 children’s fiction and nonfiction books, more than 150 newly-produced video field trips, and new content added every week. With over 16 million books and videos enjoyed since launch, Skybrary is a top-selling educational app on iTunes and recipient of numerous awards.
In 2014 Burton turned to Kickstarter to bring Reading Rainbow to “Every Child, Everywhere”—especially to classrooms in need. The campaign met its 35-day goal of raising $1 million in less than eleven hours, and set a crowdfunding record at the time with over 105,000 backers and a final tally of over $6.4 million. With these funds, in May 2015, Burton and RRKidz brought the Skybrary product to the web, accessible to 83% of American households. Then in January 2016, the education-specific, Skybrary School rolled out for teachers and students, fulfilling the promise of the crowd-funding project.
Now in his fourth decade in the industry, LeVar continues to exercise his vigorous passion for storytelling with his new podcast LeVar Burton Reads, where each episode he chooses a favorite piece of short fiction and performs it. The enormously successful podcast is in its third season and LeVar is currently touring the country with a live version of the podcast. LEVAR BURTON READS: LIVE! is coming to a theater near you.
As the honored recipient of 13 Emmy Awards, a Grammy, and five NAACP Awards, Burton has demonstrated in his career that he can do it all–acting, directing, producing, writing and speaking. He is often invited as a keynote speaker at leading education and technology events, most recently speaking at NASA, ISTE, The National Education Association, Fast Company’s Innovation Series and many more.
With millions of fans throughout the world, Burton continues his mission to inspire, educate and entertain.
The National Book Foundation announced its annual 5 Under 35 honorees, a selection of five fiction writers under the age of 35 whose debut work promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape. Each honoree was selected by a National Book Award Winner, Finalist, or Longlisted author, or by an author previously recognized by the 5 Under 35 program.
“Our 2019 5 Under 35 honorees are new authors of extraordinary promise, but their debut books are remarkable achievements for writers at any stage of their career,” said David Steinberger, Chairman of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. “Like the National Book Awards, 5 Under 35 is part of our mission to celebrate the best literature in America, and it’s a privilege to bring more praise and recognition to these wonderful young authors.”
The 2019 honorees’ books include two collections of short stories and three novels. As a group these titles present a global perspective of literature spanning from Houston to Stockholm to Palestine, and address a variety of substantial themes, including addiction, migration, politics, sports, and LGBTQ identities. Their writing has been published by Alaska Quarterly Review, The Awl, BuzzFeed, GQ, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, One Story, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and Tin House.
“Our 14th cohort of 5 Under 35 honorees join an important legacy of authors whose debut works reveal a brilliant talent that is only just beginning to shine,” said Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “We’re so grateful to welcome these exceptional authors to the National Book Foundation family, and we’re delighted to help share these important new voices with readers across the country.”
This year’s 5 Under 35 selectors are 2016 National Book Award Longlister Garth Greenwell, 2018 Finalist Brandon Hobson, 2016 National Book Award Finalist Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2006 Finalist Dana Spiotta, and 2018 Longlister Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
Previous Honorees include Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Brit Bennett, Yaa Gyasi, Danielle Evans, Lydia Kiesling, Nam Le, Valeria Luiselli, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Karen Russell, Justin Torres, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Tiphanie Yanique, as well as National Book Award Longlisted authors Molly Antopol and Akwaeke Emezi, National Book Award Finalists Angela Flournoy and Téa Obreht, and 2014 National Book Award Winner Phil Klay.
The honorees each receive a $1,000 prize and will be celebrated at an invitation-only ceremony in New York City on November 18, 2019. 5 Under 35 is sponsored by the Amazon Literary Partnership.
The 2019 Fiction Longlist includes only one title by a previous National Book Award honoree, Colson Whitehead, who was a Winner in the same category for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. One Longlisted author, Laila Lalami, was a 2018 National Book Awards judge, serving as the chair of the Fiction panel. The Longlisted authors have been recognized by numerous other awards, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Young Lions Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Whiting Award. In addition, the list includes one winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two finalists. Among these ten writers are Fulbright, Guggenheim, MacArthur, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo fellows. Their writing has been published by prestigious newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, The Bellevue Literary Review, Black Warrior Review, ESPN The Magazine, GQ, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Moscow Times, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Washington Post. The Longlist includes five debut books.
The Longlist includes two novels deeply rooted in the traditions of fantasy and speculative fiction. Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment of a trilogy from Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James, incorporates African mythology in an epic story about a lost boy and a cast of fantastical characters searching for the truth. In The Need, a genre-bending thriller and the fifth book by Helen Phillips, a paleobotanist makes impossible discoveries, is confronted by a disturbing intruder in her home, and begins to question the very foundations of reality and motherhood.
In two of the books, violent crimes reveal the tensions and fissures within what once seemed like stable communities. The Other Americans by Laila Lalami is set into motion when a Moroccan immigrant is killed under suspicious circumstances, with witnesses and survivors desperate for answers. In Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth, the search for two sisters who have disappeared from a remote Russian city ignites powerful questions about class, gender, and ethnicity.
The latest novel from 2016 National Book Award Winner Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys tells the story of two teens in the Jim Crow south who struggle to preserve their idealism and their lives at the vicious Nickel Academy—which was based on the true story of a notorious reform school that terrorized and traumatized multiple generations of students.
Two debut, place-based short story collections are included in the Longlist. Set in Denver, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina: Stories focuses on Latinas of indigenous descent and explores themes of ancestry, incarceration, illness, gentrification, and domestic violence with compassion and precision. Kimberly King Parsons’s Black Light: Stories illuminates the darker, grittier sides of the Lone Star State with stories about drugs and motels, sexuality and self-harm, and a sense of yearning the size of Texas.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong’s debut novel about a Vietnamese immigrant family, is written in an epistolary style, with a son attempting to reveal the secrets of his life to his mother, who cannot read, and challenges ideas of identity and masculinity along the way. Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner addresses male privilege and the wreckage of divorce when a father struggles to resume taking responsibility for his kids.
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is a deceptively straight-forward novel about two students at a performing arts high school who fall in love, but leaves the reader questioning what happened to their relationship as well as the relationship between fact and fiction.
Publishers submitted a total of 397 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Dorothy Allison, Ruth Dickey, Javier Ramirez, Danzy Senna (Chair), and Jeff VanderMeer. These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 8, and the Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.
2019 LONGLIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION:
The 2019 Nonfiction Longlist represents an exciting range of voices and subjects, illuminating new perspectives on political, natural, cultural, historical, and personal experiences. Hanif Abdurraqib’s history of A Tribe Called Quest is the first book showcasing hip-hop to make the list, and chef Iliana Regan’s memoir brings food writing back to the National Book Awards celebration for the first time since Julia Child won in 1980 for Current Interest – Hardcover (a discontinued category). The list includes three debut titles, and only Greg Grandin, who was a Finalist for Nonfiction in 2009, has been previously honored by the National Book Awards. The Longlisted authors have earned recognition from numerous other prizes, including the Bancroft Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the James Beard Award. These authors have received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. In addition, their writing has previously appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times, MTV News, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O Magazine, The Washington Post, and The London Review of Books.
Four memoirs have been Longlisted, showcasing a range of human experience from life-changing journeys in Central America to over 40 years of solitary confinement in one of the nation’s most brutal prisons. In What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, an unexpected encounter with a stranger brings poet Carolyn Forché to El Salvador where she is exposed to a country on the precipice of war. Focused on her family’s property in New Orleans, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells the story of how a family, a home, and a city has weathered tragedy, catastrophe, and inequality. In Burn the Place: A Memoir, self-taught chef Iliana Regan shares her story of growing up gay in an intolerant town, finding her identity through food, and launching a Michelin-starred career. Written with Leslie George, Solitary revisits the four decades Albert Woodfox spent in solitary confinement for a crime he didn’t commit, and how he—and the others in the Angola 3—turned injustice into a story of resistance and survival.
Two titles blend personal history with cultural history. In Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqib uses the pioneering hip-hop group as a lens to interrogate the historical representation and rise of black culture as he came of age in the 1990s. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, the seventh book by Ojibwe author David Treuer, introduces a counter-narrative of Native American history, contemporary culture, and survival, documenting how the culture has endured forced assimilation, land seizures, and conscription in the US military.
Several other Longlisted titles are concerned with political history and divisive movements in our past that inform our present. In Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe uses recently released interviews with Irish Republican Army members to resolve a notorious disappearance and reveal wounds that have yet to heal since the Troubles. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a scholar of black history and contemporary social justice movements, documents how the end of redlining in the 1960s and 1970s inspired new, devious forms of injustice and exploitation targeting low-income black families. Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America reckons with the historical context of President Trump’s proposed border wall—and how conflicts are boiling over from within.
The one collection of essays on the 2019 Longlist is Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays, which offers genre-bending analyses on everything from Trump rallies to beauty and black womanhood in America.
Publishers submitted a total of 600 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges for Nonfiction are Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Carolyn Kellogg, Mark Laframboise, Kiese Laymon, and Jeff Sharlet (Chair). These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 8, and the Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.
2019 LONGLIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION:
As was the case in 2018, the majority of the poets on the 2019 Longlist are newcomers to the National Book Awards. The exceptions are Jericho Brown and Arthur Sze, who were Poetry Judges in 2016 and 1999, respectively, and Toi Derricotte, who received the National Book Foundation’s 2016 Literarian Award for her work with Cave Canem. Three of the poets have won Whiting Awards, and four have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other prizes that have recognized the ten Longlisted poets include the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. The Longlisted poets have also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and Poets House. All ten of the books come from independent publishers, and this is the first time publishers Wave Books and Tin House Books have been Longlisted for a National Book Award. The list features poets in all stages of their careers, including one debut.
Two titles present strong environmental themes, addressing the beauty of nature and the impending climate crisis. Sight Lines, Arthur Sze’s tenth collection, uses a broad spectrum of voices and forms to reflect on the imperiled natural world. The site-specific poems in Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days were “drafted on foot” at various natural and industrial locations, and explore what it means to be alive in the anthropocene.
Climate change is just one of the many themes Ariana Reines addresses in A Sand Book, which also considers social media, sexual trauma, Hurricane Sandy, and the various manifestations of sand in our lives. In contrast, Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variations on Dawn and Dusk is more singular in its focus, serving as an ekphrastic meditation on the interplay of light and space in untitled (dawn to dusk), Robert Irwin’s installation in Marfa, Texas.
Politics, resistance, and social justice are notably visible themes in at least four of the Longlisted collections. Build Yourself a Boat, the debut collection from Camonghne Felix, the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications for presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren, considers what it means to survive in today’s fractured political climate, particularly for black women. Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky, who was born in the Soviet Union, imagines a protest where a gunshot literally deafens the populace. In her sixth collection, Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith sounds a call for rebellion against American complacency and compromise. And Jericho Brown’s The Tradition examines the growing presence of terror and trauma in our lives—and introduces a new poetic form called “the duplex.”
Two of the poets, Toi Derricotte and Mary Ruefle, are among those who have been delighting readers for decades. Derricotte’s “I”: New and Selected Poems includes more than 30 new poems and uses an autobiographical perspective to respond to issues of race, gender, class, and other themes. Dunce showcases Ruefle’s celebrated wit, wisdom, and uncanny awareness of the world.
Publishers submitted a total of 245 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Jos Charles, John Evans, Vievee Francis, Cathy Park Hong, and Mark Wunderlich (Chair). These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 8, and the Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.
2019 LONGLIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY:
The ten titles on the Translated Literature Longlist were originally written in ten different languages: Arabic, Danish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. The list features seven novels, two memoirs, and a collection of essays, together representing the stories and literary traditions of many nations, including Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Poland, Rwanda, and Syria. One of the authors, Olga Tokarczuk, was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature last year. The authors and translators on the list have been recognized by numerous international prizes, such as the Akutagawa Prize, the French Voices Award, the Jabuti Prize, the King of Spain Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, the Prix Renaudot, the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Toisinkoinen Literature Prize, the Transatlantyk Prize, and the United Nations Special Press Trophy.
There are three nonfiction titles on the list, including two memoirs, each providing insight into lived experiences on different continents. Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, translated from the Danish by Denise Newman, chronicles the first years of grief after Aidt’s 25-year-old son dies in a tragic accident. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump, The Barefoot Woman is ScholastiqueMukasonga’s second memoir about the Rwandan genocide and focuses on the loss of her mother. The Collector of Leftover Souls by journalist Eliane Brum and translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty is a collection of essays profiling the lives and conflicts in a variety of communities, from the favelas of São Paulo to the wilderness of the Amazon.
Three novels force distanced families and old friends to reckon with darker times. In Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth and translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, an estranged daughter is drawn back to her family after her parents’ will dredges up bitter memories and childhood traumas. Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, and translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, features four friends who realize their old, missing classmate came from a family connected to the Pinochet regime. And a family is forced to reunite to bury their father amid the wreckage of Syria’s civil war in Khaled Khalifa’s Odyssean black comedy Death Is Hard Work, which was translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.
With a turn toward both the speculative and the political are The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai. The former, which was translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is set on a mysterious island where everyday objects suddenly go missing and the memories of them are suppressed by the new eponymous police force. And in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, Ottilie Mulzet translates ambitious sentences from the Hungarian that describe a disgraced baron’s return from exile and a professor’s retreat into the woods to regain control of his thoughts, all set against mounting nationalism and a looming apocalypse.
And the two remaining novels on the list invoke traditions of myths and fairy tales to share their stories. A recluse with artistic passions believes she’s the only one who can reveal the truth behind a spate of murders in a remote village in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. In Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing, which was translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, two friends flee from Albania to Italy hoping to find acceptance and a place that makes them feel whole.
Publishers submitted a total of 145 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judging panel in the category’s second year is made up of Keith Gessen, Elisabeth Jaquette, Katie Kitamura, Idra Novey (Chair), and Shuchi Saraswat. These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 8, and the Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.
2019 LONGLIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE:
Six of the authors on the YPL Longlist have been recognized by the National Book Foundation in the past, including Cynthia Kadohata, Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In the same category, Jason Reynolds was Longlisted in 2017 and a Finalist in 2016. Kwame Alexander was Longlisted in 2016. Laura Ruby was a Finalist in 2015. Laurie Halse Anderson has previously been recognized by the National Book Award for YPL three times; she appeared on the Longlist in 2014 and was a Finalist in both 2008 and 1999. Additionally, last year, author Akwaeke Emezi was selected as a 5 Under 35 Honoree, the National Book Foundation’s prize for young debut fiction writers. Between them, these authors and illustrators have also been recognized by a variety of other prizes and honors, including the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the Newbery Medal, the Caldecott Honor, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Walter Dean Myers Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Eisner Award, and the Emmy Awards.
The 2019 YPL Longlist is a mosaic of ideas, styles, and backgrounds. The authors come from locations across the globe, from California to Pennsylvania, Nigeria to Washington, DC. Through verse, illustration, and prose, these books address gender and sexual identity, race and politics, personal history and global events, and the different worlds we can encounter even on a short walk home from school.
Look Both Ways, a novel in stories by Jason Reynolds conjures entire worlds out of ten city blocks by sharing the adventures and mishaps that befall children on their ways home from school and is punctuated by illustrations from Alex Nabaum. Randy Ribay takes a more global perspective with his novel Patron Saints of Nothing, in which a Filipino-American student’s life is upended when his cousin is murdered in connection with President Duterte’s war on drugs—and no one will talk about it. Justice and denial also factor into Akwaeke Emezi’s genre-bending first novel for young readers, Pet, in which a transgender teenager lives in a world where adults refuse to admit that the monsters surrounding them actually exist.
Among this year’s illustrated works is Kiss Number 8, a graphic novel written by Colleen AF Venable and illustrated by Ellen T. Crenshaw that explores how a friendship and a family can be disrupted when new sexual and gender identities are unexpectedly revealed. National Book Award Winner Cynthia Kadohata’s A Place to Belong follows a family that is sent back to Japan after the Pearl Harbor bombing only to encounter even more destruction when they arrive, and is interspersed with several illustrations by Julia Kuo.
Also set during World War II is Laura Ruby’s Thirteen Doors, Wolves Behind Them All, a novel that chronicles the struggles of siblings abandoned at an orphanage during one of America’s most difficult times. Martin W. Sandlerlooks farther back in history with 1919 The Year that Changed America, which uses archival images to explore a year that brought about prohibition, suffrage, and a flood of molasses.
Hal Schrieve veers into a more fantastical realm with Out of Salem, hir novel about a genderqueer zombie teenager who bonds with an “unregistered” werewolf in order to endure life in a town that won’t accept them.
Both Kwame Alexander and Laurie Halse Anderson bring verse into this year’s Longlist. Alexander’s poem The Undefeated is a tribute to black heroes in civil rights, sports, and arts, and is accompanied by vibrant illustrations by Kadir Nelson. In a reprise of her empowering novel Speak, Anderson’s SHOUT bears untold personal stories and is as much a memoir in verse as it is a call-to-action against sexual violence.
Publishers submitted a total of 325 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The judges for YPL are An Na (Chair), Elana K. Arnold, Kristen Gilligan, Varian Johnson, and Deborah Taylor. These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.
The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 8, and the Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.
2019 Longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature:
Kwame Alexander; illustrations by Kadir Nelson, The Undefeated
Versify / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Laurie Halse Anderson, SHOUT
Viking Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Akwaeke Emezi, Pet Make Me a World / Penguin Random House
Cynthia Kadohata, A Place to Belong
With illustrations by Julia Kuo
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books / Simon & Schuster
Writer and filmmaker John Waters to present Medal to White
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters medal, 2014. Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, announced that it will award Edmund White with the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL). Best known for his portrayals of gay American life in both fiction and nonfiction, White’s body of work spans subject and genre, including a biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award; a trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; pioneering works of nonfiction like The Joy of Gay Sex, the travel memoir States of Desire, and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated City Boy; and many other titles. White’s work also includes crucial cultural criticism and activism, particularly around the American AIDS crisis. In 1982, White co-founded (along with Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, and Paul Rapoport) the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first provider of HIV/AIDS care and advocacy. The DCAL will be presented to White by the prominent writer and filmmaker John Waters.
“A master of narrative and craft across fiction, journalism, memoir, and more, White has built a career defined by its indelible impact on many literary forms,” said David Steinberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “Whether it’s evocative depiction of gay life during the tumultuous 1980s, painstakingly researched biography, or elegant memoir, White’s work stands out across decades as singular in its resonance and significance for a multitude of devoted readers.”
Born in Cincinnati in 1940, White has penned nearly thirty books, beginning with the 1973 novel Forgetting Elena and continuing with the publication of the 2018 memoir The Unpunished Vice and the forthcoming 2020 novel, A Saint From Texas. In addition to his published books, White’s journalism, cultural criticism, and political activism have made him a widely acclaimed chronicler of gay American life and culture through the ages, earning him various awards and accolades, including the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
“Most writers don’t set out to break barriers or trailblaze, but rather to share their unique perspectives and stories on the page,” said Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “It’s only when you’re able to look back at a body of work that one is able to see a career like Edmund White’s for what it is: revolutionary and vital, making legible for scores of readers the people, moments, and history that would come to define not only queer lives, but also the broader trajectory of American culture.”
In addition to more than a dozen works of fiction, White is the author of fifteen other titles, including works of nonfiction and memoir that laid the groundwork for generations of LGBTQ artists and writers. White’s candid approach to writing about the lives of gay men—including his own experiences—today serve as valuable and moving documentation of the joy, devastation, and victories that defined queer life through the decades. Beyond his remarkable body of written work, White has worked as a staff writer at Time-Life Books, senior editor of The Saturday Review, and associate editor of Horizon.
White is the thirty-second recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was created in 1988 to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement. Previous recipients include Isabel Allende, Annie Proulx, Robert A. Caro, John Ashbery, Judy Blume, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Maxine Hong Kingston, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Adrienne Rich. Nominations for the DCAL medal are made by former National Book Award Winners, Finalists, judges, and other writers and literary professionals from around the country. The final selection is made by the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. Recipients of the Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters receive $10,000 and a solid brass medal.
You can find the full Associated Press announcement here.
ABOUT EDMUND WHITE
Edmund White was born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio. When White was seven his parents divorced, and he went with his mother and sister to live on the outskirts of Chicago. Summers were spent with his father in Cincinnati or Michigan. Both his parents and all his relatives were Texans, and as a child he often visited Texas aunts, cousins, and grandparents and lived one year in Dallas.
White attended Cranbrook Academy, majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan, and then moved to New York City where he worked for Time-Life Books from 1962 until 1970. After a year’s sojourn in Rome, White returned to the US, where he served as an editor at The Saturday Review and Horizon. Beginning in the late 1970s, he and six other gay New York writers—Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and George Whitmore—formed a casual club known as the Violet Quill. Meeting in one another’s apartments, they would read and critique one another’s work, then move on to high tea. Together they represented a flowering of the kind of gay writing White as a teenager in the Midwest had longed to discover.
In 1982, White co-founded (along with Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, and Paul Rapoport), the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first provider of HIV/AIDS care and advocacy. White was the first president. In 1983, White moved to France; when he returned to teach at Princeton in 1998 it was to a literary landscape devastated by AIDS. Four members of the Violet Quill—Cox, Ferro, Grumley, and Whitmore—had died, as well as numerous other promising young writers such as Tim Dlugos and John Fox, White’s student. White’s two closest friends, the critic David Kalstone and his editor Bill Whitehead, were also dead from the disease. White wrote, “For me, these losses were definitive. The witnesses to my life, the people who had shared the same references and sense of humor, were gone. The loss of all the books they might have written remains incalculable.”
White has written thirteen works of fiction, including his amalgamation of Heian Japan in The Tale of Genji and contemporary life on Fire Island, Forgetting Elena (1973), Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), and an autobiographical trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). In 2000, he published The Married Man, about life in France and the US with a lover dying of AIDS. In Jack Holmes and his Friend (2012), he took up the subject of a lifelong friendship between a straight man and a gay man. In Hotel de Dream (2007), which White considers his best book, he looks at gay life in New York in the late 19th century.
White is not only known as a novelist whose work has been widely praised by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Susan Sontag, he is also an influential cultural critic. Urbane, knowing, and sophisticated, he has chronicled gay life in the seventies through the nineties with wit, insight, and compassion. His travelogue States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980) remains a classic if insouciant (and now poignant) look at gay life at a particular cultural moment just before the onslaught of AIDS (it was recently re-issued with a new forward and postface). His pioneering book, The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Life (1977), written with Dr. Charles Silverstein, introduced millions, gay and straight and curious alike, to a brave new world of sexual practices and lifestyle.
As a biographer, Edmund White has written a monumental biography of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet (Genet, 1993) and short biographies of Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust: A Life, 1998) and the poet Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008). White’s other nonfiction includes City Boy (2009); The Flâneur (2000); Inside a Pearl (2014), about his years in Paris;and The Unpunished Vice (2018), about his life as a reader; among other memoirs. He is also a playwright. His first play, The Blue Boy in Black, was staged in 1963 and starred Cicely Tyson. His most recent play, Terre Haute (2006), was about Timothy McVeigh and Gore Vidal, and waspresented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in Ireland, and in the UK and US. He is currently writing a new play, Both Ways. Cumulatively, White’s simultaneous presence within so many different genres began to define—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—the parameters of “gay culture.”
Edmund White and his work remain central to any consideration of gay male life in late 20th-century America. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and his forthcoming novel, A Saint From Texas,will be published in August 2020. White lives in New York with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll.
John Waters. Photo credit: Greg Gorman
ABOUT JOHN WATERS
John Waters is the author of nine books, including Shock Value; Crackpot; Pink Flamingos and Other Trash; Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs; Art: A Sex Book (co-written with Bruce Hainley); Role Models; and Carsick. The gift book, Make Trouble, published by Algonquin Books in 2017, features the text, with illustrations, of Waters’ commencement speech delivered at the 2015 Rhode Island School of Design graduation ceremony and was subsequently released as an audio album in 7” single format by Third Man Records. Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, was published in May 2019.
Waters is a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries all over the world and the director of sixteen movies, including Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom, and A Dirty Shame. John Waters is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he is a past member of the boards of The Andy Warhol Foundation and Printed Matter, a former member of the Wexner Center International Arts Advisory Council, and was selected as a juror for the 2011 Venice Biennale. In 2017, Waters was honored when his “Study Art” series was selected to be featured at the Biennale in Venice. Mr. Waters also serves on the Board of Directors for the Maryland Film Festival and has been a key participant in the Provincetown International Film Festival since it began in 1999, the same year Waters was honored as the first recipient of PIFF’s “Filmmaker on the Edge” award. In September 2014, Film Society of Lincoln Center honored John Waters’ fifty years in filmmaking with a 10-day celebration entitled “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” featuring a complete retrospective of his film work.
In the fall of 2015, the British Film Institute honored Waters’ fifty-year contribution to cinema with their own program called “The Complete Films of John Waters… Every Goddam One of Them.” The French Minister of Culture bestowed the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters to Mr. Waters in 2015. In May 2016, Waters was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Arts. In February 2017, John Waters was honored with the Writers Guild of America, East’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award honoring his body of work as a writer in motion pictures. “Indecent Exposure”, a retrospective of Waters’ art was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 2018, to January 2019, and on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH from February 2 to April 28, 2019.
The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, announced Oren J. Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) since 2009, as the recipient of its 2019 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Recognizing the key cultural and economic role that independent bookstores play in their communities, the ABA provides information, education, business tools, programs, and advocacy for local businesses across the country, working to strengthen and expand independent bookstores nationwide, efforts which Teicher has effectively spearheaded.
Appointed to the position of Associate Executive Director of the ABA in 1990, Teicher, who will retire at the end of 2019, has also served as Director of Government Affairs, founding President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and as ABA’s Chief Operating Officer. The Literarian Award will be presented to Teicher by Ann Patchett, bestselling author of books like Bel Canto, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth, and owner of independent bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.
“We are lucky enough to be at a moment where, across the nation, books are rising,” said Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “But this moment of essential recognition for books and booksellers would have looked very different were it not for enormous resilience shown by indies and the teams that support them, navigated steadfastly by Oren Teicher. We are honored to recognize his immense contributions, and we are grateful for where those efforts have taken us—a position from which we can joyfully look toward a continued, rich literary future.”
In support of the bookselling community, Teicher has emphasized the importance of the shop local movement, advocated for fair and sustainable tax laws, and worked to put the struggles and successes of independent bookstores into the public consciousness through increased media coverage and broader cultural awareness.
Working closely with store owners, booksellers, and the publishing industry, Teicher has encouraged the growth of Winter Institute and Children’s Institute, further cultivating a strong and united bookselling community, and has invigorated collaborations between indies and publishers through improved sales terms and innovative marketing incentives. From 2009 to 2019, during the years of Teicher’s tenure as CEO of the ABA, the number of independent bookstores jumped from 1,651 to 2,534, with ABA membership as well as store sales increasing in lock step.
“Booksellers and the publishing world at large could not have hoped for a more passionate and effective advocate than they found in Oren Teicher,” said David Steinberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “For three decades at the ABA, Teicher has been an absolute champion for booksellers, readers, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores across the nation, and the thriving state of bookselling reflects that work.”
As CEO, Teicher was a critical force behind ABA’s IndieBound program, which helps create community among independent booksellers, connecting stores with authors, readers, and one another, and positioning indies so that they are able to better amplify the message of small businesses’ positive cultural impact.
In recognition of this work, Teicher will receive the Literarian Award at the 70th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20, 2019 in New York City. This is the fifteenth year that the Foundation has presented the Literarian Award, which is given to an individual or organization for a lifetime of achievement in expanding the audience for books and reading. Past recipients include Dr. Maya Angelou, Joan Ganz Cooney, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Terry Gross, Kyle Zimmer, the literary organization Cave Canem, Richard Robinson, and, most recently, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Doron Weber.
Nominations for the Literarian Award are made by former National Book Award Winners, Finalists, and judges, and other writers and literary professionals from around the country. Final selections are made by the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. Recipients of the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community receive $10,000.
You can find the full Publishers Weekly announcement here, and learn more about the work of the American Booksellers Association at the ABA website.
ABOUT OREN J. TEICHER
Oren J. Teicher is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Booksellers Association, the national trade association for independent booksellers, and he has been working on behalf of independent bookstores for more than thirty years, beginning in 1990 as the ABA Associate Executive Director, then as Director of Government Affairs, as the founding President of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and, through 2009, as ABA’s Chief Operating Officer. He was appointed as ABA’s CEO in 2009. Teicher has played an integral part in ABA’s IndieBound program, Local First initiatives, and he works closely with independent business alliance boards and other independent retail trade associations. He has forged relationships with bookseller associations around the world; and has served as an officer of the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF).
Teicher has received numerous awards and recognition for his work; including being named Publishers Weekly’s Person of the Year in 2013.
He announced this past March that he will be retiring from ABA at the end of 2019.
Before joining ABA, Teicher was the Director of Corporate Communications for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, and he served for many years as a senior staffer in the U.S. Congress.
Ann Patchett. Photo credit: Heidi Ross
ABOUT ANN PATCHETT
Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, What now?, and, most recently, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. She has won numerous prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Patchett is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.
