American Book Award Winners

First presented in 1980, by the Before Columbus Foundation, “the American Book Awards Program respects and honors excellence in American literature without restriction or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre. There would be no requirements, restrictions, limitations, or second places. There would be no categories. The winners would not selected by any set quota for diversity, because diversity happens naturally. Finally, there would be no losers, only winners. The only criteria would be outstanding contribution to American literature in the opinion of the judges.”

Here we present the American Book Award recipients of African descent.

Select Year20222019201820172016201520142012201120102009200820072006200520042003200220011999199819971995199419931992199119901989198819871986198519841983198219811980

3 Books Honored in 1991

Fiction

Book Description: 
From “one of America’s premier writers of fiction” (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move. The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire — a young boy who was seen running from the flames.
An impassioned, brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America, "Philadelphia Fire isn’t a book you read so much as one you breathe" (San Francsisco Chronicle).

Nonfiction

Book Description: 
The author, a New York State Supreme Court Justice and a black man, argues that our legal system is fundamentally unfair towards African Americansand documents his assertion with many cases drawn from his long experience as a lawyer and judge. A timely and relevant subject in the aftermath of the Rodney King trials and the LA riots.

Nonfiction

Book Description: 
For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks’s classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the ’80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The result is a poignant collection of essays which, like all of hooks’s work, is above all else concerned with transforming oppressive structures of domination.