The American Book Award is an American literary award that annually recognizes a set of books and people for "outstanding literary achievement". According to the 2010 awards press release, it is "a writers' award given by other writers" and "there are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers."
The Award is administered by the Before Columbus Foundation, which established it in 1978 and inaugurated it in 1980, recognizing a list of eight 1979 publications. The Award honors excellence in American literature without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. Previous winners include novelists, social scientists, poets, and historians such as Toni Morrison, Edward Said, Isabel Allende, bell hooks, Don DeLillo, Robin D.G. Kelley, Joy Harjo.
The 36th annual American Book Awards presented October 25, 2015 at the San Francisco Jazz Center. The winners are as follows:
Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Vintage)
Arlene Biala, her beckoning hands (Word Poetry)
Arthur Dong, Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970 (DeepFocus Productions)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press)
Peter J. Harris, The Black Man of Happiness (Black Man of Happiness Project)
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster)
Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account (Pantheon)
Manuel Luis Martinez, Los Duros (Floricanto Press)
Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn)
Carlos Santana with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (Little, Brown and Company)
Ira Sukrungruang, Southside Buddhist (University of Tampa Press)
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Henry Holt)
Anne Waldman, Lifetime Achievement
For seven years 1980 to 1986, there were two distinct sets of American Book Awards. The other is now officially one stage of the National Book Awards (NBA) history.
The National Book Foundation is responsible for the National Book Awards (U.S.) from 1989 and officially recognizes a continuous NBA history from 1949/1950. Part of that history is those so-called American Book Awards that formally replaced the National Book Awards after their 1979/1980 cycle, were revamped for 1984, and were renamed "National" in 1987.
The American Book Award is also unrelated to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), although that organization maintains a complete list of award winners that is readily available. Since the 1970s that trade group is also unrelated to the National Book Awards, which it established in 1936 and jointly re-established them as book industry awards in 1950.
1980
Douglas Woolf for Future preconditional: A collection
Edward Dorn for Hello, La Jolla
Jayne Cortez for Mouth on Paper
Leslie Marmon Silko for Ceremony
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for Random Possession
Milton Murayama for All I Asking for Is My Body
Quincy Troupe for Snake Back Solos
Rudolfo Anaya for Tortuga, a novel
1981
Alta for Shameless Hussy
Alan Chong Lau for Songs for Jadina
Bienvenido N. Santos for Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories
Helen Adam for Turn Again to Me & Other Poems
Lionel Mitchell for Traveling Light
Miguel Algarín for On Call
Nicholasa Mohr for Felita
Peter Blue Cloud for Back Then Tomorrow
Robert Kelly for The Time of Voice: Poems 1994–1996
Rose Drachler for The Choice
Susan Howe for The Liberties
Toni Cade Bambara for The Salt Eaters
1982
Al Young for Bodies and Soul
Duane Niatum for Songs for the Harvester of Dreams: Poems
E. L. Mayo for Collected Poems E L Mayo
Frank Chin for The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon
Hilton Obenzinger for This Passover or the next, I will never be in Jerusalem
Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung for Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940
Jerome Rothenberg for Pre-Faces and Other Writings
Joyce Carol Thomas for Marked by Fire
Leroy Quintana for Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
Lorna Dee Cervantes for Emplumada
Ronald Phillip Tanaka for The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry
Russell Banks for Book of Jamaica
Tato Laviera for Enclave
1983
Barbara Christian for Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976
Cecilia Liang for Chinese Folk Poetry
Evangelina Vigil-Piñón for Thirty: An' Seen a Lot
Harriet Rohmer for Legend of Food Mountain: LA Montana Del Alimento
James D. Houston for Californians: Searching for the Golden State
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn for Pet food & tropical apparitions
John A. Williams for Click Song, a novel
Joy Kogawa for Obasan
Judy Grahn for The Queen of Wands: Poetry
Nash Candelaria for Not by the Sword
Peter Guralnick for Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians
Seán Ó Tuama for An Duanaire Sixteen Hundred to Nineteen Hundred: Poems of the Dispossessed
1984
Cecil Brown for Days Without Weather
Gary Snyder for Axe Handles: Poems
Howard Schwartz, Mark Podwal for The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Reb Nachman
Imamu Amiri Baraka for Anthology of African American Women: Confirmation Men
Jesús Colón for A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches
Joseph Bruchac for Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets
Maurice Kenny for The Mama Poems
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for The heat bird
Miné Okubo for Citizen 13660
Paule Marshall for Praisesong for the Widow
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, You-shan Tang, Ellen Lai-shan Yeung for Pie-Biter
Thomas McGrath for Echoes inside the labyrinth
Venkatesh Kulkarni for Naked in Deccan
William J. Kennedy for O Albany!
1985
Angela Jackson for Solo in the Box Car Third Floor E
Arnold Genthe, John Kuo Wei Tchen for Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown
Colleen J. McElroy for Queen of the Ebony Isles
Gary Soto for Living Up The Street
Peter Irons for Justice at War
Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, Muin Ozaki for Poets Behind Barbed Wire
Louise Erdrich for Love Medicine, a novel
Maureen Owen for Amelia Earhart
May Sarton for At Seventy: A Journal
Robert Edward Duncan for Ground Work: Before the War
Ron Jones for Say Ray
Sandra Cisneros for The House on Mango Street
Sonia Sanchez for Homegirls and Handgrenades
Julia Vinograd for "The Book of Jerusalem"
William Oandasan for Round Valley Songs
1986
Anna Lee Walters for The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories
Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Helen Barolini for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women
Jeff Hannusch for I Hear You Knockin : The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
Linda Hogan for Seeing Through the Sun
Miguel Algarín for Time's Now/Ya Es Tiempo
Natasha Borovsky for A Daughter of the Nobility
Raymond Federman for Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts
Susan Howe for My Emily Dickinson
Terence Winch for Irish Musicians/American Friends
Toshio Mori for Yokohama, California
1987
Ai for SIN
Ana Castillo for The Mixquiahuala Letters
Cyn Zarco for Circumnavigations
Daniel McGuire for Portrait of Little Boy in darkness
Dorothy Bryant for Confessions of Madame Psyche: Memoirs and Letters of Mei-Li Murrow
Etheridge Knight for The Essential Etheridge Knight
Gary Giddins for Celebrating Bird: The Triumph Of Charlie Parker
Harvey Pekar for The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland
James Welch for Fools Crow
John Wieners for Selected Poems: 1958–1984
Juan Felipe Herrera for Face Games
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum for liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy
Michael Mayo for Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry
Septima Poinsette Clark, Cynthia Stokes Brown for Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative
Terry McMillan for Mama
1988
Allison Blakely for Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
Charles Olson for The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems
Daisy Bates for The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir
David Halberstam for The Reckoning
Edward Sanders for Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961–1985
Gerald Vizenor for Griever: An American Monkey King in China
Jimmy Santiago Baca for Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
Kesho Y. Scott, Cherry Muhanji, Egyirba High for Tight Spaces
Marlon K. Hom for Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
Benjamin Hoff for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
Ronald Sukenick for Down and in: Life in the Underground
Salvatore La Puma for The Boys of Bensonhurst
Toni Morrison for Beloved
Wing Tek Lum, Tek Lum Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points
1989
Alma Luz Villanueva for The Ultraviolet Sky
Askia M. Touré for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance!
Audre Lorde for A Burst of Light
Carolyn Lau for Wode Shuofa: My Way of Speaking
Emory Elliott for Columbia Literary History of the United States
Eduardo Galeano for Genesis
Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
Henry Louis Gates for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Isabel Allende for Eva Luna
J. California Cooper for Homemade Love
Jennifer Stone for Stone's Throw
Josephine Gattuso Hendin for The Right Thing to Do
Leslie Scalapino for way
Shuntaro Tanikawa for Floating the River in Melancholy
Charles Fanning for The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction
William Minoru Hohri for Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress
1990
Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)
Elizabeth Woody for Hand into Stone: Poems
Hualing Nieh for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
Itabari Njeri for Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone
James M. Freeman for Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives
John C. Walter, J. Raymond Jones for The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920–1970
John Norton for Light at the End of the Bog
José Emilio González for Vivar a Hostos
Sergei Kan for Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century
Lloyd A. Thompson for Romans and Blacks
Martin Bernal for Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster for Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry
Miles Davis for Miles
Paula Gunn Allen for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology
1991
Alejandro Murguía for Southern Front
Bell Hooks for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Bruce Wright for Black Robes, White Justice: Why Our Legal System Doesn't Work for Blacks
Charley Trujillo for Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
D. H. Melhem for Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews
Deborah Keenan for Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile
Jessica Hagedorn for Dogeaters
John Edgar Wideman for Philadelphia Fire, a novel
Joy Harjo for In Mad Love and War
Karen Tei Yamashita for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Lucia Berlin for Homesick: New and Selected Stories
Mary Crow Dog for Lakota Woman
Meridel Le Sueur for Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories
Mill Hunk Herald Collective for Overtime: Punchin' Out With the Mill Hunk Herald Magazine
Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer for Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory
R. Baxter Miller for The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes
Thomas Centolella for Terra Firma
1992
A'Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
Art Spiegelman for The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Benjamin Alire Sáenz for Calendar of Dust
Donna J. Haraway for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Fritjof Capra for Belonging to the universe: Explorations on the frontiers of science and spirituality
José Antonio Burciaga for Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado: A Personal Anthology of Poetry
Keith Gilyard for Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
Lucy Thompson for To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
Norma Field for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End
Peter Bacho for Cebu
Peter Kalifornsky for Dena'ina Legacy: K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky
Raymond Andrews for Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire
Sandra Scofield for Beyond Deserving
Sheila Hamanaka for Journey
Stephen R. Fox for The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II
Steven R. Carter for Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity,
Verlyn Klinkenborg for The Last Fine Time
William B. Branch, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson for Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama
1993
Asake Bomani, Belvie Rooks for Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris
Christopher Mogil, Peter Woodrow for We Gave Away a Fortune
Cornel West for Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
Denise Giardina for Unquiet Earth
Diane Glancy for Claiming Breath
Eugene B. Redmond for The Eye in the Ceiling
Francisco X. Alarcón for Snake Poems
Gerald Graff for Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
Jack Beatty for The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
Leroy V. Quintana for The History of Home
Katherine Peter for Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country
Nelson George for Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball
Ninotchka Rosca for Twice Blessed, a novel
1994
Giose Rimanelli for Benedetta in Guysterland
Eric Drooker for Flood!: A Novel in Pictures
Graciela Limón for In Search of Bernabe
Gregory J. Reed for Economic Empowerment Through the Church
Janet Campbell Hale for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
Jill Nelson for Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
Lawson Fusao Inada for Legends from Camp
Nicole Blackman for Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Paul Gilroy for The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
Ronald Takaki for A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
Rose L. Glickman for Daughters of Feminists
Tino Villanueva for Scene from the Movie GIANT
Virginia L. Kroll for Wood-Hoopoe Willie
1995
Abraham Rodriguez for Spidertown, a novel
Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology
Denise Chavez for Face of an Angel
John Egerton for Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
John Ross for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas
Thomas Avena for Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
Linda Raymond for Rocking the Babies, a novel
Li-Young Lee for The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for Crossing Ocean Parkway
Marnie Mueller for Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest
Peter Quinn for Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York
Sandra Martz for I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted
Gordon Henry Jr. for The Light People
Tricia Rose for Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
1996
Agate Nesaule for A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
Arthur Sze for Archipelago
Chang-Rae Lee for Native Speaker
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for Arranged Marriage
E.J. Miller Laino for Girl Hurt
Glenn C. Loury for One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility in America
James W. Loewen for Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Joe Sacco, Edward Said for Palestine
Kimiko Hahn for The Unbearable Heart
Maria Espinosa for Longing
Robert Viscusi for Astoria
Sherman Alexie for Reservation Blues
Ron Sakolsky, Fred Weihan Ho for Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution
Stephanie Cowell for The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke
William H. Gass for The Tunnel
1997
Alurista for Et Tu ... Raza
Derrick Bell for Gospel Choirs: Psalms Of Survival In An Alien Land Called Home
Dorothy Barresi for The Post-Rapture Diner
Guillermo Gómez-Peña for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
Louis Owens for Nightland
Martín Espada for Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems
Montserrat Fontes for Dreams of the Centaur, a novel
Noel Ignatiev for Race Traitor
Shirley Geok-lin Lim for Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
Sunaina Maira for Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
Thulani Davis for Maker of Saints
Tom De Haven for Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, a novel
William M. Banks for Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life
Brenda Knight for Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
1998
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Dog Road Woman
Angela Y. Davis for Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Brenda Marie Osbey for All Saints: New and Selected Poems
Don DeLillo for Underworld
Jim Barnes for On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
John A. Williams for Safari West: Poems
Nancy Rawles for Love Like Gumbo
Nora Okja Keller for Comfort Woman
Sandra Benitez for Bitter Grounds, a novel
Scott DeVeaux for The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
Thomas Lynch for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
1999
Alice McDermott for Charming Billy
Anna Linzer for Ghost Dancing
Brian Ward for Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
Chiori Santiago for Home to Medicine Mountain
E. Donald Two-Rivers for Survivor's Medicine: Short Stories
Edwidge Danticat for The Farming of Bones
Judith Roche, Meg McHutchison for First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim
Gioia Timpanelli for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
Gloria Naylor for The Men of Brewster Place, a novel
James D. Houston for The Last Paradise
Jerry Lipka, Gerald V. Mohatt, Ciulistet Group for Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup¡k Eskimo Examples
Trey Ellis for Right Here, Right Now
Josip Novakovich for Salvation and Other Disasters
Lauro Flores for The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature
Luís Alberto Urrea for Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life
Nelson George for Hip Hop America: Hip Hop and the Molding of Black Generation X
Speer Morgan for The Freshour Cylinders
Gary Gach for What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
Chiori Santiago, author, Judith Lowry, illustrator, Home to Medicine Mountain
2000
Esther G. Belin for From the Belly of My Beauty
Allan J. Ryan for The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
Andrés Montoya for The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems
Camille Peri, Kate Moses for Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
David A. J. Richards for Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
David Toop for Exotica
Elva Trevino Hart for Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
Emil Guillermo for Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective; With an Introduction by Ishmael Reed
Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
Helen Thomas for Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times
Janisse Ray for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
Leroy TeCube for Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier's Story
Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Heads By Harry
Michael Lally for It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose
Michael Patrick MacDonald for All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto for Why She Left Us, a novel
Robert Creeley for The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005
Editor/Publisher: Ronald Sukenick
Jack E. White, Journalism
Frank Chin, Lifetime Achievement
Robert Creeley, Lifetime Achievement
2001
Amanda J. Cobb for Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852–1949
Andrea Dworkin for Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation
Carolyne Wright for Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
Chalmers Johnson for Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Cheri Register for Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir
Chris Ware for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Diana Garcia for When Living Was a Labor Camp
Elizabeth Nunez for Bruised Hibiscus
Janet McAdams for Island of Lost Luggage
Philip Whalen for Overtime: Selected Poems
Russell Leong for Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories
Sandra M. Gilbert for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1999
Ted Joans for Teducation
Tillie Olsen for Silences
William S. Penn for Killing Time With Strangers
Malcolm Margolin, Editor
Ted Joans, Lifetime Achievement
Tillie Olsen, Lifetime Achievement
Philip Whalen Lifetime Achievement
2002
Aaron A. Abeyta, Colcha
Susanne Antonetta, The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
Rilla Askew, Fire in Beulah
Tananarive Due, The Living Blood
Gloria Frym, Homeless at Home
Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon
LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker
Alex Kuo, Lipstick and Other Stories
Michael N. Nagler, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
Donald Phelps, Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
Al Young, The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990–2000
Jessel Miller, Angels in the Vineyards
Lerone Bennett, Lifetime Achievement
Jack Hirschman, Lifetime Achievement
2003
Kevin Baker, Paradise Alley
Debra Magpie Earling, Perma Red
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Rick Heide, ed., Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga, Vera Metcalf, and Lars Krutak, eds, Akuzilleput Igaqullghet, Our Words Put to Paper: Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
Alejandro Murguía, This War Called Love: Nine Stories
Jack Newfield, The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
Joseph Papaleo, Italian Stories
Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
Jewell Parker Rhodes, Douglass' Women, a novel
Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
Velma Wallis, Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
Max Rodriguez, QBR: The Black Book Review
2004
Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent, a novel
David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
Kristin Hunter Lattany, Breaking Away
A. Robert Lee, Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
Diane Sher Lutovich, What I Stole
Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation
Renato Rosaldo, Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Arana
Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
Michael Walsh, And All the Saints
2005
Bernard W. Bell, The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
Cecelie Berry, Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood
Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Julie Chibbaro, Redemption
Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
Alisha S. Drabek and Karen R. Adams, The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
Ralph M. Flores, The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
Don Lee, Country of Origin, a novel
Lamont B. Steptoe, A Long Movie of Shadows
Don West, No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, eds Jeff Biggers and George Brosi
Journalism: Bill Berkowitz
2006
MacKenzie Bezos, The Testing of Luther Albright, a novel
Matt Briggs, Shoot the Buffalo
David P. Diaz, The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second-Generation Mexican-American
Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
Thomas Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
Tim Z. Hernandez, Skin Tax
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
P. Lewis, Nate
Peter Metcalfe, Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
Kevin J. Mullen, The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, eds., A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
Matthew Shenoda, Somewhere Else
Carlton T. Spiller, Scalding Heart
Chris Hamilton-Emery, Editor
Jay Wright, Lifetime Achievement
2007
Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
Rigoberto González, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains, a novel
Ernestine Hayes, Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans
Gary Panter, Jimbo's Inferno
Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown
Judith Roche, Wisdom of the Body
Kali Vanbaale, The Space Between
2008
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Jonathan Curiel, Al’ America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots
Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká, Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, All That Lies Between Us
Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998
C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style
Angela Jackson, Where I Must Go, a novel
L. Luis Lopez, Each Month I Sing
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock
Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet
Lorenzo Thomas, Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition, ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
J. J. Phillips, Lifetime Achievement
2009
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era
Danit Brown, Ask for a Convertible
Jericho Brown, Please
José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, eds Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón
Claire Hope Cummings, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juarez
Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems
Suheir Hammad, Breaking Poems
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music
Patricia Santana, Ghosts of El Grullo
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
Miguel Algarín, Lifetime Achievement
2010
Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music
Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song
Nancy Carnevale, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook
Stephen D. Gutierrez, Live from Fresno y Los
Victor Lavalle, The Big Machine
François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated by Ron Scollon from Chipewyan
Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls
Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Poems for the Millennium: Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems
Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems
Katha Politt, Lifetime Achievement
Quincy Troupe, Lifetime Achievement
2011
Keith Gilyard, John Oliver Killens
Akbar Ahmed, Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam
Camille Dungy, Suck on the Marrow
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel
William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and Classical Tradition
Gerald Vizenor, Shrouds of White Earth
Eric Gansworth, Extra Indians
Ivan Argüelles, The Death of Stalin
Geoffrey Alan Argent, ed., The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 1: The Fratricides, translated by Argent from French
Neela Vaswani, You Have Given Me a Country
Sasha Pimentel Chacón, Insides She Swallowed
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History of Culture in the United States
Carmen Giménez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds
Luis Valdez, Lifetime Achievement
John A. Williams, Lifetime Achievement
2012
Annia Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
Arlene Kim, What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?
Ed Bok Lee, Whorled
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Shann Ray, American Masculine
Alice Rearden, translator; Ann Fienup-Riordan, ed., Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput: Our Nelson Island Stories
Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now
Amy Waldman, The Submission
Mary Winegarden, The Translator’s Sister
Kevin Young, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
Eugene B. Redmond, Lifetime Achievement
2013
Will Alexander, Singing In Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose, Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture, Essay Press
Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, Cargo
Philip P. Choy, San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide To Its History & Architecture, City Lights
Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist, Harper Collins
Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was An Aztec, Copper Canyon Press
Louise Erdrich, The Round House, Harper Collins
Alan Gilbert (American academic), Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, University of Chicago
Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet, Aunt Lute Books
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir, W.W. Norton & Co.
Demetria Martinez, The Block Captain's Daughter, University of Oklahoma Press
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Blood Songs, The Ecstatic Exchange
D. G. Nanouk Okpik, Corpse Whale, University of Arizona Press
Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War On Student Radical and Reagan's Rise to Power, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Christopher B. Teuton, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liar's Club, University of North Carolina
Lew Welch, Ring of Bone: Collected Poems, City Lights
Ivan Argüelles, Lifetime Achievement
Greil Marcus, Lifetime Achievement
Floyd Salas, Lifetime Achievement
2014
Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, Metropolitan Books
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire; The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, University of California Press
Juan Delgado (poetry) and Thomas McGovern (photography), Vital Signs, Heyday Books
Alex Espinoza, The Five Acts of Diego León, Random House
Jonathan Scott Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940, University of North Carolina Press
Joan Naviyuk Kane, Hyperboreal, University of Pittsburgh Press
Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Tanya Olson, Boyishly, YesYes Books
Sterling D. Plumpp, Home/Bass, Third World Press
Emily Raboteau, Searching For Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Atlantic Monthly Press
Jerome Rothenberg with Heriberto Yepez, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, Commonwealth Books
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Metropolitan Books
Margaret Wrinkle, Wash, Atlantic Monthly Press
Koon Woon, Water Chasing Water, Kaya Press
Armond White, Anti-Censorship Award
Michael Parenti, Lifetime Achievement
2015
Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Vintage)
Arlene Biala, her beckoning hands (Word Poetry)
Arthur Dong, Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970 (DeepFocus Productions)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press)
Peter J. Harris, The Black Man of Happiness (Black Man of Happiness Project)
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster)
Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account (Pantheon)
Manuel Luis Martinez, Los Duros (Floricanto Press)
Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn)
Carlos Santana with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (Little, Brown and Company)
Ira Sukrungruang, Southside Buddhist (University of Tampa Press)
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Henry Holt)
Anne Waldman, Lifetime Achievement
