Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominees and Winning Books

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America s character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.

Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother s only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.

David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother s shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father s dream of emancipation for the entire family.

Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain s colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person s life.

A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner s daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?

All three come together on Jack s land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.

• Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize 2025 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
• Winner of the 2026 PEN America Open Book Award
• Winner of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction)
• Winner Georgia Author of the Year (First Novel)
• Shortlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2026 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
• Finalist for the 2026 Zora Award for Debut Fiction

A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in the novel Ibis.

Justin Haynes proves himself an absolute alchemist of fiction . . . This is a stunning debut as witty as is it is rapturous. Jericho Brown, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Tradition

There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.

New Felicity s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.

Skittish that the reporter s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time from the town s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.

In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros s fate.

With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.

Named a Best Book of 2025 by Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Forbes.

"A gracefully told and sharply observed debut." Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age

A heart-rending debut novel about a Nigerian immigrant as she tries to find her place at home and in America a powerful epic about love, grief, family, and belonging.

The Tiny Things Are Heavier follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by the guilt of leaving Mezie behind, Sommy struggles to fit into her new life as a student and an immigrant. Lonely and homesick, Sommy soon enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, a relationship that plummets into deceit when Sommy falls for Bryan, a biracial American, whose estranged Nigerian father left the States immediately after his birth. Bonded by their feelings of unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship.

During summer break, Sommy and Bryan visit the bustling city of Lagos, Nigeria, where Sommy hopes to reconcile with Mezie and Bryan plans to connect with his father. But when a shocking and unexpected event throws their lives into disarray, it exposes the cracks in Sommy's relationships and forces her to confront her notions of self and familial love.

A daring and ambitious novel rendered in stirring, tender prose, The Tiny Things Are Heavier is a captivating portrait that explores the hardships of migration, the subtleties of Nigeria's class system, and how far we'll go to protect those we love.

From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed Til the Well Runs Dry, comes a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to dedicate her days to her autistic son, Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course.

Yet when Davis s colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence s past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, long hidden and now at risk of coming to light. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.

Lauren Francis-Sharma s previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.

[R]ichly evocative a brilliant and beautiful volume. Booklist, starred review
A lavish, eye-catching rethinking of ages-old stories. Kirkus Reviews, starred review

From the acclaimed fine artist Harmonia Rosales, a sweeping retelling of African myth illustrated throughout with Rosales s spectacular paintings.

In Chronicles of Ori, her debut book, Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths she has long treasured, crafting an enthralling epic that spans the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. She writes of the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals. At the center of these linked tales is the bond, sometimes fraying, between the Orishas and the humans who worship them. It was the Orishas who made humans, and who gave them their most precious resource: their Oris, or destinies. Vividly brought to life by Rosales s artwork, Chronicles of Ori will enlighten and delight readers for years to come.

26 illustrations

One of USA Today s 15 Books You Should Read This Summer
One of Atlanta Journal-Constitution s Hot New Summer Reads
One of People s Most Anticipated Summer Books

The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 National Book Award winner and bestseller Hell of a Book

People Like Us is Jason Mott s electric new novel. It is not memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason s life. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with dreamlike experiences that pull a reader in and don t let go, from the ability to time travel to sightings of sea monsters and peacocks, and feelings of love and memory so real they hurt.

In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.

People Like Us is wickedly funny and achingly sad all at once. It is an utter triumph bursting with larger-than-life characters who deliver a very real take on our world. This book contains characters experiencing deep loss and longing; it also is buoyed by riotous humor and characters who share the deepest love. It is the newest creation of a writer whose work amazes, delivering something utterly new yet instantly recognizable as a Jason Mott novel.

Finishing the novel will leave you absolutely breathless and, at the same time, utterly filled with joy for life, changed forever by characters who are people like us.

A New York Times bestseller

Pulitzer Prize winning writer, editor and TV host Jonathan Capehart recounts powerful stories from his life about embracing identity, picking battles, seizing opportunity and finding his voice.

MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart is one of the most recognizable faces in cable news. But long before that success, Capehart spent his boyhood growing up without his father, shuttling back and forth between New Jersey and rural Severn, North Carolina, and contemplating the complexities of race and identity as they shifted around him. It was never easy bridging two worlds; whether being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too Black or not Black enough, Capehart struggled to find his place. Then, an internship at The Today Show altered the course of his life, bringing him one step closer to his dream. From there, Capehart embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

Yet Here I Am takes us along that journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay Black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally to his move to New York City, where time and again he stumbles and picks himself up as he blazes a path to become the familiar face in news we know today.

Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and finding one s voice and purpose along the way.

• BookRiot s Best New Nonfiction
• NPR s New Books to Read
• Ms. Magazine s Most Anticipated Feminist Book

A crucial telling of U.S. history centering the Black women whose magic gave rise to the rich tapestry of American culture, wellness, and spirituality that we see today from Vicks VapoRub and Aunt Jemima s pancake mix, to the magic of Disney s The Little Mermaid (2023), and the all-American blue jean.

Emerging first on plantations in the American South, enslaved conjure women used their magic to treat illnesses. These women combined their ancestral spiritual beliefs from West Africa with local herbal rituals and therapeutic remedies to create conjure, forging a secret well of health and power hidden to their oppressors and many of the modern-day staples we still enjoy.

In The Conjuring of America, Black feminist philosopher Lindsey Stewart exposes this vital contour of American history. In the face of slavery, Negro Mammies fashioned a legacy of magic that begat herbal experts, fearsome water bearers, and powerful mojos roles and traditions that for centuries have been passed down to respond to Black struggles in real time. And when Jim Crow was born, Granny Midwives and textile weavers leveled their techniques to protect our civil and reproductive rights, while Candy Ladies fed a generation of freedom crusaders.

Sourcing firsthand accounts of the enslaved, dispatches from the lore of Oshun, and the wisdom of beloved Black women writers, Stewart proves indisputably that conjure informs our lives in ways remarkable and ordinary. Above all, The Conjuring of America is a love letter to the magic Black women used to sow messages of rebellion, freedom, and hope.

Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays is a profoundly personal exploration of mental health, identity, and survival. Through a collection of essays, poetry, and reflections, the author shares their journey as a Black, queer woman grappling with chronic illness, grief, and societal pressures. Themes of self-love, resilience, and navigating life s challenges are central to the narrative, as the author confronts the complexities of race, gender, and mental health. The work invites readers into a raw and emotional journey, offering a universal message about survival and the power of finding strength in the face of adversity.

Shane McCrae, peer to the peerless (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.

Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell
Is death the muse of Heaven I don t know
O muse of where howcan I hope to go
To where I pray I ll go sing at least tell

Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, McCrae s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice. Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

A visual & lyrical declaration filled with fever & flight, Reprise, Golden s second collection of poetry & photography, maps a personal search for safety in a US that offers none.

Golden s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic. These sonically playful poems and assertive, color-saturated portraits reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.

At its heart, this collection asks: Where is home? Who is free? What makes a nation?

Golden seeks portals towards self-liberation. In their pursuit, we re invited to witness and learn from their interior revolution, from which they emerge more free to declare themselves in small and large ways: Whether stating I just want to wear my orange dress to the tennis courts & come back home unbothered or I am home in the arms of the armed.

Building on their debut collection A Dead Name That Learned How to Live and their award-winning self-portraiture series On Learning How to Live, Golden honors the living siege & sorrow, rage & revival, joy & creation of being Black and trans in America.

• Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
• Winner of the American Book Award
• Minnesota Book Award winner
• A Best Book of 2025 by the New York Public Library

On the heels of Sho (winner, Griffin Poetry Prize) and Optic Subwoof (Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism), Douglas Kearney s visual poetry masterpiece, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, pushes further into Kearney s long-time practices of performance typography, collaging pre-existing media sources to create singular, multiplicitous texts that defy neat categorization.

Through AfroFuturistic exploration of these techniques, Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow. Engaging a rich history of visual poetics, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always almost predicts its endurance as a visionary work of genius.