National Book Award Winners Nikky Finney (Head Off & Split, 2011 Poetry Winner) and Robin Coste Lewis (Voyage of the Sable Venus, 2015 Poetry Winner) excavate and reimagine family and historical archives as poetry in their recent books Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry and To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness.
The authors join National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming, 2014 Young People’s Literature Winner) in conversation on the care of community archival work and the power of Black stories amidst continued book banning.
Presented in partnership with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This is an official 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event.
The 2023 Fiction Longlist includes authors at all stages of their careers, and features a debut novel and a debut short story collection. Three authors on the Fiction Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was a 2018 5 Under 35 honoree; Jayne Anne Phillips was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2009; and Justin Torres was a 2012 5 Under 35 honoree. The Longlisted authors have been recognized by numerous other awards and honors, including the Arts and Letters Award, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Whiting Award, and many more. Among these ten Longlisters are Cullman Center, Guggenheim, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellows. Their writing has been featured in A Public Space, Granta, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Two titles centering queer characters ask: how do the stories we tell to and about ourselves impact our identity, self-understanding, and history itself? An unnamed narrator is tasked with continuing his dying mentor’s life work in Justin Torres’ Blackouts. The story—inspired by a queer-led research study that was co-opted to pathologize homosexuality—considers the gaps in personal and collective queer history, and how stories have the power to keep people alive. Eliot Duncan’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age story Ponyboy follows its titular character from Paris to Berlin where he grapples with reconciling his trans-masculinity and the expectations of his girlfriend, Baby. As he spirals deeper into substance abuse and eventually overdoses, Ponyboy returns home to Iowa in this exploration of addiction, recovery, and naming oneself.
Two novels consider the interiorities, and subjugation, of Black and Indigenous women. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopian novel Chain-Gang All-Stars simulates a private for-profit prison system where prisoners compete in live-broadcast gladiator-inspired death matches. This novel positions freedom as an impossible prize and offers unflinching commentary on the exploitation of Black women, systemic racism, capitalism, and mass incarceration. Inventively structured, A Council of Dolls is the story of three generations of Native women—Cora, Lillian, and Sissy—told in reverse chronological order with help from the dolls that kept them company from childhood into adulthood. Mona Susan Power illuminates the horrors of Indian boarding schools, the impacts of intergenerational trauma, and the enduring strength that comes from unconditional, ancestral love.
This year’s Longlist includes two titles that study the effects of war within countries and communities. In Tania James’s epic 18th-century tale, Loot, a young woodcarver is commissioned by the sultan to build a life-size, mauling tiger automaton, which is stolen by the British. Spanning decades and ranging from India to Europe, this novel is an interrogation of war and colonialism that asks who has the right to claim ownership over art and history. One hundred years later, across the Atlantic Ocean is Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch, which follows a mother and daughter in post-Civil War West Virginia. Twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother Eliza are left at an asylum by a war veteran, and the duo become entangled in the facility and the lives of the people who work there—the cook, the doctor, and the peculiar man they call the Night Watch—in this story of endurance, healing, and starting over.
Two titles in this year’s Longlist parse the intersection of power, influence, and subjugation. Inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, Paul Harding’s novel This Other Eden traces the legacy and lineage of the racially integrated fishing community living on a secluded island off the coast of Maine from 1792 to the early 20th century. When a white missionary arrives on the island, the predominately Black and poor community is swiftly displaced from their homes as a result of the rising eugenics movement in this tale of survival and belonging in the face of intolerance. In a different remote village in northern Scandinavia, Hanna Pylväinen’s The End of Drum-Time follows native Sámi residents as they weather a Lutheran minister’s vexatious attempts to convert them—and the wholly unexpected conversion of one of the town’s most esteemed reindeer herders. When the minister’s daughter falls in love with the son of the unlikely convert, she joins the herders on their annual migration to the sea as this intensely researched 19th-century novel weaves together cultural, spiritual, and political divides.
The two short story collections recognized reflect upon the interplay of faith, culture, and community. From a dutiful daughter interrupted by her father’s ghost as she attempts to write his eulogy to a teenager who discovers she never believed in God, the characters in Aaliyah Bilal’s ten stories are forced to reckon with conflicts between religion and independence. In her debut short story collection Temple Folk, Bilal compassionately unfurls the inner lives of her protagonists, examining the complex contradictions of the Black Muslim experience in America. At the heart of LaToya Watkins’s short story collection Holler, Child is yearning, displayed in wives dismissed by their partners, sisters searching for their estranged brother, and a father who becomes overly attached to his dog after his son’s death. Featuring a cast of Black men and women hailing from West Texas, the characters in these eleven stories grapple with grief, secrets, and the realization that you’ll never fully know those you love.
Publishers submitted a total of 496 books for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Steph Cha, Calvin Crosby, Silas House, Mat Johnson (Chair), and Helena María Viramontes. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
2023 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House
The 2023 Nonfiction Longlist includes emerging and established writers, and features works of memoir, science writing, biographies of both iconic figures and unsung heroes, investigative works that reframe historically significant events, and more. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016, is the sole honoree on the 2023 Nonfiction Longlist who has been previously recognized by the National Book Awards. This year’s Nonfiction Longlist includes two MacArthur Fellows and a Guggenheim Fellow. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the Orwell Prize, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Their work has appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The American Historical Review, The Atlantic, Artforum, Ebony, Essence, GQ, National Geographic, TheNew York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Two memoirs in this year’s Longlist explore what it means to be a conflicted citizen, and what it means to live through conflict. In his memoir, Viet Thanh Nguyen weaves together an intensely personal reflection of the Vietnamese refugee experience with the history of colonization, war, and anti-Asian racism in the United States. A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial is a complex meditation on Nguyen’s life as a father and a son, and an exploration of the murkiness of memory and necessity of forgiveness. Three decades after his father’s assassination in 1985, attorney and activist Raja Shehadeh tasks himself with reviewing his father’s archives and uncovers legal cases, letters, and other meticulously organized documents that shine a new light on his father’s legacy as a lawyer and Palestinian human rights activist. A simultaneously personal and historically rich memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir probes the fraught relationship between a father and son, examining the many ways their lives are parallel both despite, and because of, disagreement.
Two titles recognize the profound impact of Indigenous peoples and Black Americans on US history and its necessary context to understand present-day America and how it came to be. Historian Ned Blackhawk recontextualizes five centuries of US, Native, and non-native histories to argue that in the face of extreme violence, land dispossession, and catastrophic epidemics, Indigenous peoples played, and continue to play, an essential role in the development of American democracy. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History brings Native American history to the forefront of the narrative, acknowledging Native communities’ agency, strength, and ongoing efforts to reclaim autonomy. Kidada E. Williams examines the Reconstruction-era South from the perspective of formerly enslaved people as they began to build new lives in defiance of white supremacist violence. I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction investigates overlooked archival records, employs oral history methods, and includes new scholarship on the impacts of generational trauma to consider the enduring effects of political disenfranchisement, economic inequality, and anti-Black violence.
The 2023 Nonfiction Longlist includes two books authored by journalists that dive deep into the environmental and societal ramifications of human behavior—on one another and on the world around them. Journalist Donovan X. Ramsey explores the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s through four profiles of individuals whose lives were impacted by the crisis. Connecting the civil rights era and war on drugs to today’s conversations about police brutality, gentrification, and mass incarceration, When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era argues that the low-income Black and brown communities disproportionately affected should receive the assistance they have been denied for generations. Just over the US border, journalist John Vaillant studies the May 2016 wildfire that devastated a small city in central Canada and its relationship to climate science, fossil fuels, and the unparalleled destruction brought about by modern wildfires in Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Ultimately, Vaillant makes the case that the catastrophic Fort McMurray event was not an anomaly, but rather a foreboding window into what the future holds.
Two Longlisted titles analyze individual histories to tell a broader story about American history. King: A Life—the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, and the first to include newly declassified FBI files—offers a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the civil rights leader as an imperfect man.Jonathan Eig’s lens provides new insights into the King family and wider activist network, while underscoring the relevance of King’s call for equality, freedom, and racial and economic justice today. In The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to six artists who lived and worked on the same street in lower Manhattan during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Peiffer’s touching group biography questions the very idea of a “movement”—tracing the respective careers of this distinctive creative community and their impact on art and film in the late 20th century.
Two Longlisted titles collect, inspect, and make meaning of documents of the past to imagine new futures. Ordinary Notes gathers personal and public artifacts that cover everything from history, art, photography, and literature, to beauty, memory, and language. Across 248 notes, Christina Sharpe examines the legacy of white supremacy and slavery, crowdsources entries for a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and presents a kaleidoscopic narrative that celebrates the Black American experience. Inspired by global feminist movements, Cristina Rivera Garza travels to Mexico City to recover her sister’s unresolved case file nearly 30 years after she was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Drawing on police reports, notebooks, handwritten letters, and interviews from those who were closest to her, Rivera Garza preserves her sister’s legacy and examines how violence against women affects everyone, regardless of gender, in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.
Publishers submitted a total of 638 books for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges for Nonfiction are Hanif Abdurraqib, Ada Ferrer(Chair), James Fugate, Sarah Schulman, and Sonia Shah. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
2023 Longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction:
The National Book Foundation announced the Longlist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 3.
The 2023 Poetry Longlist includes poets in all stages of their publishing careers. Only one honoree on the Poetry Longlist has been previously honored by the National Book Awards: Monica Youn was a Finalist for Poetry in 2010 and a Longlister for Poetry in 2016. This year’s Poetry Longlist includes a Guggenheim Fellow and three National Endowment for the Arts Fellows. The poets have been recognized by the American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Award, and more. Three of the books come from university presses and six come from independent publishers, including one publisher that is appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: the University of Georgia Press.
Monica Youn offers a piercing examination of America’s obsession with what it considers “other” in her latest collection, From From. Through poetry and personal essays, Youn manipulates technique and subject—from Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons and Proust to the television show Fresh Off the Boat and Greek mythology—to confront American racism and anti-Asian violence and reflect back the question of “where are you from from” onto its readers. Paisley Rekdal, too, confronts anti-Asian sentiments and the Asian experience in the US—primarily from a historical perspective. West: A Translation is a hybrid collection of poems and lyric essays inspired by an anonymous carving at a detention center in San Francisco eulogizing a Chinese migrant who died there by suicide. Informed by historical artifacts and her own family’s history, Rekdal presents a translation of the anonymous poem followed by “notes” that contextualize the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, built during the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Three works offer meditations on the possibilities of individual and collective survival, while also confronting the precarity of the modern world. Annelyse Gelman’s book-length poem Vexations—titled and structured after Erik Satie’s 19th-century piano score of the same name—follows a mother and daughter traveling through a dystopian world where the contagion at hand affects human empathy. Vexations embodies both speculative fiction and call-to-action across a sonic, cinematic soundscape. In Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan examines his queer, mixed-race identity and the legacies of anti-Blackness and colonialism in the US and abroad. At the core of Shanahan’s collection is a poem about a catastrophic bus accident he survived during a trip to his mother’s native Morocco. Across three distinct sections, Shanahan contends with erasure, mortality, and against all odds, living. Evie Shockley plays with visuals, sounds, and poetic form to pay homage to Black feminist visionaries, both living and departed in her collection suddenly we. Shockley asks readers to envision a more balanced relationship between inner self and outer community, and ultimately, a more expansive definition of the collective “we.”
In two collections, new paths are forged and ancestral ways are preserved, demonstrating poetry’s ability to transcend any one time or medium. from unincorporated territory [åmot] is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series dedicated to the history of his homeland and the culture of the indigenous Chamoru people from the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam). Through experimental poems, Perez observes and asserts storytelling as an act of resistance—a written form of “åmot,” the Chamoru word for “medicine”—that champions decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice. John Lee Clark’s How to Communicate considers the small joys and pains of life, and the endless possibilities of language through poems influenced by the Braille slate and translated from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language used by DeafBlind people that’s rooted in touch. The result is an inventive and human exploration on the power of tactility and of poetry.
Several collections on this year’s Longlist consider migration to and in the United States and explore the inherent complexities—and joys—of diasporic identity. In The Diaspora Sonnets, Oliver de la Paz chronicles his family’s search for a home in the US after leaving the Philippines in 1972. The reader travels from coast to coast alongside de la Paz’s uprooted family, as the sonnets themselves become homes for belonging, longing, and displacement. Promises of Gold positions love—cultural, familial, platonic, and for one’s self—as a hopeful and healing anecdote to intergenerational trauma. José Olivarez reflects on his experience as the son of Mexican immigrants and the slipperiness of the American Dream in this collection, which includes a complete translation from the original English into Spanish by poet David Ruano González. Tripas celebrates Brandon Som’s upbringing in a multicultural, multigenerational home—honoring his Chinese American father who ran the family corner store and his Mexican Nana who worked on the assembly line at Motorola. Som’s poems traverse languages, cultures, and borders, connecting his family histories and heritages in a conversation about migration, labor, and memory.
Publishers submitted a total of 295 books for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Rick Barot, Heid E. Erdrich (Chair), Jonathan Farmer, Raina J. León, and SolmazSharif. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
2023 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry:
The ten titles on this year’s Translated Literature Longlist were originally published in seven different languages: Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Six honorees have previously been recognized as Longlisters or Finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Khaled Khalifa and Leri Price were Finalists in 2019 for Death Is Hard Work, and Price was a Finalist again in 2021 for Samar Yzabek’s Planet of Clay; Fernanda Melchor and Sophie Hughes were Longlisted in 2020 for Hurricane Season; and Pilar Quintana and Lisa Dillman were Finalists in 2020 for The Bitch. The authors and translators on the list have been recognized by numerous international prizes, including the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, the Biblioteca de Narrativa Prize, the Goncourt Prize, the International Booker Prize, the Otras Voces Otros Ámbitos Prize, the P.C. Hooft Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
Three of this year’s Longlisted titles blur the line between fiction and reality, questioning where art and creator begin and end. After a famous French botanist dies in the early 1800s, his daughter discovers his unpublished memoir, which reveals his hidden past chasing the story of Maram—a young noblewoman who escaped slavery in West Africa. Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, translated from the French by Sam Taylor and inspired by Senegal’s oral traditions, contemplates the brutality of French colonial occupation and the consequences of obsession, love, and betrayal. The Most Secret Memory of Men follows a different quest—a Paris-based Senegalese novelist enamored with a literary mystery: the disappearance of the “Black Rimbaud.” In Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, the narrator eventually tracks down the reclusive author—based on real-life Malian writer Yambo Ouloguem—and seeks to bring his long-lost novel to a new generation of readers. Mysteries continue for the unnamed narrator in TheDevil of the Provinces who returns to his native Colombia after 15 years abroad, only to find himself entangled in his brother’s unsolved murder while substitute teaching at a boarding school where girls give birth to peculiar creatures. As everything unravels in this novel by Juan Cárdenas and translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis, the protagonist has to accept that he may be destined to spend the rest of his days in the city he thought he’d left behind for good and with no clear answers in sight.
In Abyss by Pilar Quintana, 8-year-old narrator Claudia makes sense of the world through observing the adults around her: a beloved tía, a dependable yet taciturn father, and a depressed mother obsessed with reading celebrity gossip and relaying tales of famous suicides. When a new family member’s arrival threatens to upend the family’s precarious dynamic, Claudia calls upon the fantastical to reconcile confusing scenes she witnesses with the reality she thought she knew. Set in Cali, Colombia, and translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, the novel shows readers that children are sometimes the most capable of knowing and perceiving the complexities of living.
Two story collections consider how acts of violence can shape individuals and entire societies. A collection of stories each based on true events, This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor delves into the minds and motivations of killers and misfits, inviting the reader to think twice before classifying them as monsters. Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and set in and around Veracruz, Mexico, these stories are as much about communities in crisis as they are about how everyday people learn to cope when horrifying acts of violence become commonplace. Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur, the ten stories in Cursed Bunny dive headfirst into the surreal—a pregnant woman is forced to identify the father of her unborn child or face unspeakable consequences, another woman’s bodily waste comes back to haunt her, and in another story a cursed lamp brings misfortune to anyone who touches it. Bora Chung blends genre and form to tackle the very real horrors of big tech, capitalism, and the patriarchy.
Two novels set in South America focus on the interior lives of queer narrators at the margins of society. In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, Raimundo, now in his seventies, is finally able to read a letter from his childhood friend and lover, Cícero, which resurfaces intense memories—of his first love, his illiterate upbringing in an impoverished area of Northern Brazil, and the life he created for himself after leaving. Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, this debut novel is an exploration of queer desire, violence and shame, and the transformative power of the written word. In Astrid Roemer’s On A Woman’s Madness, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott, Noenka, a queer Black woman, escapes her hometown and her abusive husband just nine days after their wedding. Determined to live a life of her choosing in the capital of Suriname, Noenka seeks a new framework for romance after she falls in love with an older woman and attempts to live a life made nearly impossible by society’s worst patriarchal and colonial impulses.
Characters chase personal freedom as their worlds collapse in two Longlisted novels. In No One Prayed Over TheirGraves, friends Hanna and Zakariya find their lives upended when a flood destroys their homes and places of worship—one Christian and one Muslim—in their Syrian village, killing nearly all of their neighbors and family members. This novel follows the men as they reimagine their lives after tragedy in this testament to faith, place, and the meaning of home, written by Khaled Khalifa and translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck tells the story of a tumultuous romance that begins in East Berlin during the 1980s when 19-year-old Katharina begins an affair with Hans, a writer in his 50s. Set against the backdrop of the declining German Democratic Republic, and translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, the novel demonstrates the parallels between personal and political identities and explores the tensions between pleasure and pain, submission and domination, and East and West.
Publishers submitted a total of 154 books for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judges for Translated Literature are Geoffrey Brock, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, Cristina Rodriguez, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Jeremy Tiang (Chair). Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15.
2023 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature:
Juan Cárdenas, The Devil of the Provinces Translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis Coffee House Press
Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur Algonquin Books / Hachette Book Group
David Diop, Beyond the Door of No Return Translated from the French by Sam Taylor Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann New Directions Publishing
Stênio Gardel, The Words That Remain Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato New Vessel Press
Khaled Khalifa, No One Prayed Over Their Graves Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Fernanda Melchor, This Is Not Miami Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes New Directions Publishing
Pilar Quintana, Abyss Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman World Editions
Astrid Roemer, On a Woman’s Madness Translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott Two Lines Press
This year’s Longlist is composed of 11 newcomers to the National Book Awards. The ten titles highlight three works of nonfiction—including a graphic memoir; and seven works of fiction—including a picture book and two graphic novels. Authors appearing on this list have been honored by the Caldecott Medal, the Middle East Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Children, among others.
Through moving prose and captivating illustrations, the titles on the 2023 YPL Longlist center characters coming of age from a diversity of perspectives and identities. These books trace family histories, re-frame historical and scientific events, and are placed in settings from 1930s Ukraine to a small town in present-day Pennsylvania—and even in a fictional town called the National Quiet Zone.
Three titles—Huda F Cares?, A First Time for Everything, and Parachute Kids—are all written and illustrated by their authors and center vacations that take unexpected turns. During her family’s road trip from Dearborn, Michigan to Orlando, Florida, Huda can’t help but feel self-conscious when it seems like all eyes are on her visibly Muslim family during rest stops, prayer time, and at Disney World. Huda Fahmy’s graphic novel Huda F Cares? is a story about self-acceptance, proudly practicing your faith, and the joys and embarrassments of sisterhood. Dan Santat captures the awkward middle school experience in A First Time for Everything, a graphic memoir inspired by his travels through France, Germany, Switzerland, and England. In this graphic memoir, readers learn that Dan is a good kid who is used to being made fun of, which is why he’s not particularly eager to go on a class trip to Europe. Much to his surprise, in that same trip, Dan experiences a series of life-changing firsts—his first sip of Fanta, first time listening to French rap, first time getting lost in a foreign country, and first time falling in love. In Parachute Kids, Feng-Li and her two siblings are excited to visit the United States for the first time, but at the end of their monthlong vacation they find out that their parents plan to return to Taiwan, leaving the siblings in California with family friends. In this graphic novel by Betty C. Tang, the siblings learn to live with each other as they navigate racist bullies, grasp a new language, and are thrust headfirst into American culture.
Three titles on this year’s Longlist illuminate the complexity of historical and scientific events to help readers make sense of them. Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day, thoughtfully highlights how some of the most intricate structures that keep our society moving—like water, the electrical grid, and the internet—came to be. Complete with graphs, maps, and diagrams, this nonfiction graphic novel written and illustrated by Dan Nott explores hidden systems’ impacts on the environment, the structural inequities they magnify, and the changes we must all embrace now in order to improve our future. More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom takes readers on a journey that looks beyond Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech to explore the March on Washington’s often overlooked radical roots. Using photos and reports from Black newspapers, Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long focus on the role of Black women activists who made the protest possible and connect the demands for jobs and freedom from six decades ago to today’s continued fight for economic and racial justice. The Lost Year interrogates a chapter of Ukrainian history, following 13-year-old Matthew as he uncovers a family secret tracing back to Holodomor, a government-imposed famine that led to the death of millions of Ukrainians. Katherine Marsh guides the reader through alternating timelines that link three cousins through 1930s Ukraine, 1930s Brooklyn, and present-day New Jersey to weave together a story about survivor’s guilt, sacrifice, and resistance.
Two Longlisted titles follow protagonists looking for hope and community amidst traumatic events. In Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow, Ian Gray fights to maintain his family’s home, find a job, and care for his mother as she recovers from her opioid addiction—all the while adopting Gather, a stray dog he isn’t supposed to have. Cadow’s debut novel is a coming-of-age story based in rural Vermont about the importance of resiliency, survival, and companionship. In Simon Sort of Says, when Simon O’Keeffe becomes the only survivor of a school shooting, he and his family move to a town in the United States where the internet, and all electronic devices, are banned: the National Quiet Zone. Erin Bow’s novel is a tribute to the power of friendship and the courage it takes to pursue joy in a world of violence.
In Alyson Derrick’s solo authorial debut, Stevie loses her memory after a devastating fall, erasing the past two years of her life: her plans to escape her conservative hometown, coming to terms with her queer identity, and even her girlfriend, Nora. Forget Me Not explores the inevitability of fate and the significance of having to choose the one you love all over again. Self-love is at the heart of Big, a picture book written and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. Big is the story of a little girl with a big heart and big dreams who—on the playground and in ballet class—learns that “big” doesn’t always have a positive connotation. Harrison deftly addresses the adultification of Black girls and anti-fatness, while offering readers an important reminder that words matter and that it’s okay for bodies to take up space.
Publishers submitted a total of 348 books for the 2023 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The judges for Young People’s Literature areSarah Park Dahlen, KyleLukoff, Claudette S. McLinn (Chair), justin a. reynolds, and Sabaa Tahir. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners in all categories will be announced live at the National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.
2023 Longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature:
Erin Bow, Simon Sort of Says Disney-Hyperion Books / Disney Publishing Worldwide
The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, announced that it will award Rita Dove with the 2023 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL). Dove’s sweeping body of work features eleven books of poetry, including Museum, Grace Notes, Selected Poems, Mother Love, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, American Smooth, Sonata Mulattica,Playlist for the Apocalypse, and her debut collection, The Yellow House on the Corner; a novel, Through the Ivory Gate; a collection of her Poet Laureate lectures titled The Poet’s World; a short story collection, Fifth Sunday; and the play The Darker Face of the Earth. She is the Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah, her third collection of poetry based loosely on the lives of her maternal grandparents. From 1993 to 1995, Dove served as the first Black Poet Laureate of the United States. Dove, whose career-spanning Collected Poems 1974–2004 was an NAACP Image Award winner and a Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry, will be presented with the DCAL Medal by author, National Book Award Finalist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown at the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on November 15, 2023.
Dove is the only poet to date to have received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her numerous honors include the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2014 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, a 2017 NAACP Image Award, the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2021 Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and 29 honorary doctorates from higher education institutions.
“Throughout her career, Rita Dove’s poetry has served as a guiding light for readers and writers alike, and has made an indelible impact on our literary and cultural heritage,” said David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “It is with great pride that we celebrate Rita Dove’s powerful and expansive body of work by presenting her with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.”
Dove was born in Akron, Ohio; she is a graduate of Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, studied German poetry at Universität Tübingen as a Fulbright fellow, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. From 1999–2000, Dove served as a Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress and was the Poet Laureate of the state of Virginia from 2004–2006. She was the editor of both The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She has written numerous plays and songs; Dove’s musical training includes cello, viola da gamba, and classical voice, and she is also a ballroom dancer. Dove is currently the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1993.
“Rita Dove’s oeuvre—from poetry, plays, and songs to essays and fiction—is a testament to her dazzling skill across genre and form,” said Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “Dove’s work transforms the everyday into the remarkable, brilliantly blending music, politics, and, let’s not forget, pleasure. With her writing, Dove proves that (as she notes) ‘nothing is too small or ordinary’ to be ‘worthy of poetry’ and affirms that history transcends mere instruction. Rita Dove is central to the legacy of American literature, and the Foundation is so proud to honor her extensive literary accomplishments.”
Dove is the 36th 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 Walter Mosley, Edmund White, Isabel Allende, Robert A. Caro, John Ashbery, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Karen Tei Yamashita, and most recently, Art Spiegelman. 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, presented at the National Book Awards.
The 74th National Book Awards will feature special guest Oprah Winfrey on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The in-person Ceremony & Benefit Dinner, which will be broadcast live for readers everywhere, will include the presentation of the Foundation’s two lifetime achievement awards and the 2023 National Book Award Winners in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. For more information about the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the broadcast, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
ABOUT RITA DOVE
Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio on August 28, 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar as one of the hundred top American high school graduates that year, she received her BA summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio in 1973 and her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1977. From 1974–1975 she held a Fulbright scholarship at Universität Tübingen in Germany.
Dove has published eleven poetry collections: The Yellow House on the Corner; Museum; Thomas and Beulah, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize; Grace Notes; Selected Poems; Mother Love; On the Bus with Rosa Parks, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Smooth; Sonata Mulattica, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Collected Poems 1974–2004, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry, and Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry; and Playlist for the Apocalypse, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry.
She has also published a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday; the novel Through the Ivory Gate; essays under the title The Poet’s World; and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the Royal National Theatre in London, and in many other venues. Among her numerous collaborations with composers is Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams; it premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For “America’s Millennium,” the White House’s 1999/2000 New Year’s celebration, Ms. Dove contributed—in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams’s music—a poem to Steven Spielberg’s documentary The Unfinished Journey. Her song cycle A Standing Witness, with music by Richard Danielpour and sung by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, premiered in 2021, and another song cycle composed by Danielpour, The Unfinished Journey, followed in September 2023.
Ms. Dove was the editor of The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. She also wrote a weekly column, “Poet’s Choice,” for The Washington Post from 2000–2003 and was the New York Times Magazine’s poetry editor from 2018–2019.
From 1993–1995, Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004–2006; she also was, together with Louise Glück and W.S. Merwin, special consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress’s bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. She has received numerous literary and academic recognitions, foremost among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as only the second Black poet to have received it, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950. Among her other honors are a Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and a Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.
In 2006, Ms. Dove received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols, and Queen Noor of Jordan). In 2007 she held the Chubb Fellowship at Yale University; followed by the Library of Virginia’s 2008 Literary Lifetime Achievement Award; the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award and the Premio Capri in 2009; the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2010; the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award and the Carole Weinstein Prize in 2014; the 2015 Poetry and People International Prize in Guangdong, China; the 2016 Stone Award from Oregon State University; and the 2017 Harold Washington Literary Award. Also in 2017 came the Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award and the inaugural U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation Award, which she accepted together with fellow 1970 Presidential and National Merit Scholar Merrick Garland. The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement followed in 2018 and, in 2019, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the North Star Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University, and the Langston Hughes Medal from The City College of New York.
In 2021, the members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters chose Ms. Dove as the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry (as the third woman and first Black poet to receive the Academy’s highest honor in its 110-year history). In 2022, she received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation and the Bobbitt Prize for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress.
President Bill Clinton presented Ms. Dove the 1996 National Humanities Medal / Charles Frankel Prize, and President Barack Obama presented her with the 2011 National Medal of Arts, making her the only poet who has received both national medals.
To date, 29 honorary doctorates have been conferred upon Ms. Dove, most recently by Yale University, Emory University, Smith College, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa.
Ms. Dove served on the board of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP; now Association of Writers and Writing Programs) from 1985–1988, leading the organization as its president from 1986–1987. From 1994–2000, she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa, and from 2005–2011, she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Since 1991 she has been on the jury of the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. A member of PEN America, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Rita Dove held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia (UVA) from 1993 to 2020; since 2020 she is Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at UVA. A classically trained cellist and gambist, she lives in Charlottesville with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.
ABOUT JERICHO BROWN
Jericho Brown (Photo credit: Brian Cornelius)
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition, which was a Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, TIME Magazine, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, announced Paul Yamazaki, principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco, California, as the recipient of its 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Starting out as a part-time clerk at City Lights in 1970, Yamazaki has mentored generations of booksellers, and his collaborative approach to bookselling has elevated countless authors, shaping the United States’ literary landscape for over 50 years. A champion for books, writers, publishers, and independent bookstores, Yamazaki will be presented with the Literarian Award by past recipient and revered bookseller Mitchell Kaplan at the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on November 15, 2023.
“Paul Yamazaki’s career has had an irreplaceable, culture-shifting impact on bookselling, independent bookstores, and publishing at large,” said David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “Over more than five decades, Paul has brought exceptional national and global literature to readers in San Francisco and beyond. Yamazaki’s legacy has demonstrated the power of connecting the right book to the right reader at the right time, both to move book sales and to center voices that better reflect the country’s diversity of readers. The Foundation is gratified to be able to recognize his contributions to the national literary landscape with this lifetime achievement award.”
An advocate for considering the intersections of race, culture, and socio-economics in bookselling, writing, and publishing, Yamazaki has served on the board of directors of several literary and community arts organizations, including the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), Small Press Distribution (SPD), and the Kearney Street Workshop (KSW). As a bookseller at City Lights, Yamazaki reads widely and is committed to supporting the work of new and established authors across genres, from publishers small and large, in order to appeal to all kinds of readers. Under his stewardship, the bookstore carefully curates a collection of books that includes literary fiction, poetry, works in translation, and more that celebrates what Yamazaki calls “alternative literary voices,” and to which he credits the bookstore’s exceptionally diverse staff handpicking titles that reflect a variety of interests and life experiences.
“A beloved member of the literary community, Paul Yamazaki and his devotion to the art of bookselling have influenced countless booksellers,” said Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “For over 50 years, Yamazaki has nurtured thoughtful conversations around books with writers, publishers, and readers, and he continues to be an inspiring force for the independent bookstore community. We are proud to celebrate his remarkable career with the 2023 Literarian Award.”
In the 1960s, Yamazaki participated in the San Francisco State College Strike—the longest student strike in US history that led to the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College; was a vocal supporter of the Black Panther Party; and was arrested multiple times for protesting exclusionary policies and participating in “Stop the Draft” demonstrations, culminating in a six-month prison sentence. Yamazaki was released early after securing a job at City Lights and, as far as Yamazaki knows, is the only independent bookseller to become a bookseller directly after serving a jail sentence.
Yamazaki is the 19th recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, 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, Terry Gross, Kyle Zimmer, the literary organization Cave Canem, Doron Weber, Oren J. Teicher, Carolyn Reidy, Nancy Pearl, and most recently, Tracie D. Hall. 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 and a solid brass medal.
The 74th National Book Awards will feature special guest Oprah Winfrey on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The in-person Ceremony & Benefit Dinner, which will be broadcast live for readers everywhere, will include the presentation of the Foundation’s two lifetime achievement awards and the 2023 National Book Award Winners in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. For more information about the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the broadcast, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
ABOUT PAUL YAMAZAKI
Paul Yamazaki has been a bookseller at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers since 1970. He has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers for more than 50 years. Yamazaki has served on the board of directors of several literary and community arts organizations, among them are the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), Small Press Distribution (SPD), and the Kearney Street Workshop (KSW). He was once a member of the jury that selected the 21 writers that were included on the Granta Best Young American Novelists 2 that was published in the spring of 2007. Yamazaki participated as a panelist in The Translation Market, a world literature and translation summit, and as a delegate of American booksellers invited to attend the Beijing Book Fair. He has also participated at the Oxford Conference for the Book at the University of Mississippi, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Jaipur Literary Festival. Yamazaki was on the jury for the 2014 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was a recipient of the Litquake Barbary Coast Award.
Yamazaki has worked with the following organizations: the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, Ford Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, American Booksellers Association, Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, National Book Foundation, Creative Work Fund, and many others.
ABOUT MITCHELL KAPLAN
Mitchell Kaplan. (Photo credit: Susie J. Horgan)
Mitchell Kaplan, a native of Miami Beach, opened the first Books & Books in 1982 in Coral Gables, Florida. Now with four South Florida locations, Books & Books hosts over 400 events per year. In addition, the original Coral Gables location is home to the well-established Café at Books & Books, and there are Books & Books affiliated stores at the Miami International Airport, and in Key West, where he collaborates with the noted author Judy Blume and her husband, George Cooper.
Among his honors, Mitchell served as president of the American Booksellers Association, and he received the 2011 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community from the National Book Foundation. Books & Books also received Publishers Weekly’s Bookstore of the Year Award in 2015. He now serves on the Board of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
As co-founder of the Miami Book Fair in 1985, Mitchell has served as the chairperson of its Board of Directors and continues to guide the programming team at the Fair which takes place on the campus of Miami Dade College in the heart of downtown Miami. Each year, the Fair presents close to 500 authors over one week in November, along with a street festival where bookstalls line the streets adjacent to the campus. Programming takes place in Creole, Spanish, and English, reflecting the diversity of Miami.
Mitchell, with his partner Paula Mazur, established The Mazur Kaplan Company to bring books to the screen, both in film and television. His most recent release is Let Him Go starring Diane Lane and Kevin Costner.
Mitchell also hosts the podcast The Literary Lifewith Mitchell Kaplan, broadcast from Miami, where he lives with his wife, Rachelle. They have three children, Anya, Daniel, and Jonah.
Image of Paul Yamazaki. (Photo credit: Marissa Leshnov for The Los Angeles Times)
