American Book Award Winners

Before Columbus Foundation Logo 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.


2 Books Honored in 2022

Nonfiction

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
by Daphne A. Brooks

Publication Date: Feb 23, 2021
List Price: $39.95
Format: Hardcover, 608 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780674052819
Imprint: Belknap Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Parent Company: Harvard University

Read a Description of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound



Book Description: 

An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonc exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?

Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae’s liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cecile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.

With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.



Fiction

What Storm, What Thunder
by Myriam J. A. Chancy

Publication Date: Oct 05, 2021
List Price: $27.95
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781951142766
Imprint: Tin House Books
Publisher: Tin House Books
Parent Company: Tin House Books

Read a Description of What Storm, What Thunder



Book Description: 

Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced—this has been the position of Haitian women within their own society, as well as how they have been seen by foreign occupiers. Romanticized symbols of nationhood, they have served, however unwillingly, as a politicized site of contestation between opposing forces.

In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women’s literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction—as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women’s social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation’s ambivalent political climate. Through daring and sensitive readings, simultaneously historical, fictional and autobiographical, Chancy explores this literature, seeking to uncover answers to the current crisis facing these women today, both within their country and in exile.The writers surveyed include Anne-christine d’Adesky, Ghislaine Rey Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and Edwidge Danticat, whose work has recently achieved such high acclaim.