NAACP Image Awards Winners and Nominees
In 2020, the NAACP celebrates the 51st anniversary of Image Awards. There are 5 titles nominated in eight literature categories; Biography/Autobiography, Children, Debut Author, Fiction,
Instructional, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Youth/Teens
39 Image Award Winning and Nominated Books for 2016
Winner - Biography/Autobiography
Between The World And Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- A Top 10 Book in the “Nonfiction Books from the 21st Century” Category
- 10 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 2 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists
- Kirkus Prize Finalist/Winner 2015
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2015
Publication Date: Jul 01, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780812993547
Imprint: Spiegel & Grau
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Nominee - Biography/Autobiography
After The Dance: My Life With Marvin Gaye
by Jan Gaye and David Ritz
Publication Date: May 01, 2015
List Price: $25.99
Format: Hardcover
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780062135513
Imprint: Amistad
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corporation
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Nominee - Biography/Autobiography
Power Forward: My Presidential Education
by Reggie Love
Publication Date: Feb 03, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781476763347
Imprint: Simon & Schuster
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: CBS Corporation
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Nominee - Biography/Autobiography
One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York
by Arthur Browne
Publication Date: Jun 30, 2015
List Price: $27.95
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780807012604
Imprint: Beacon Press
Publisher: Beacon Press
Parent Company: Unitarian Universalist Association
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When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as godfather to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the Hellfighters of Harlem. He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department. At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.
Winner - Children
Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America
by Carole Boston Weatherford
Publication Date: Feb 01, 2015
List Price: $16.99
Format: Hardcover, 32 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
Target Age Group: Picture Book
ISBN13: 9780807530177
Imprint: Albert Whitman & Company
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Parent Company: Albert Whitman & Company
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His white teacher tells her all-black class, You’ll all wind up porters and waiters. What did she know? Gordon Parks is most famous for being the first black director in Hollywood. But before he made movies and wrote books, he was a poor African American looking for work. When he bought a camera, his life changed forever. He taught himself how to take pictures and before long, people noticed. His success as a fashion photographer landed him a job working for the government. In Washington DC, Gordon went looking for a subject, but what he found was segregation. He and others were treated differently because of the color of their skin. Gordon wanted to take a stand against the racism he observed. With his camera in hand, he found a way. Told through lyrical verse and atmospheric art, this is the story of how, with a single photograph, a self-taught artist got America to take notice.
Nominee - Children
If You Plant a Seed
by Kadir Nelson
Publication Date: Mar 03, 2015
List Price: $18.99
Format: Hardcover, 32 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Picture Book
ISBN13: 9780062298898
Imprint: Balzer + Bray
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corporation
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Nominee - Children
Granddaddy’s Turn: A Journey to the Ballot Box
by Michael S. Bandy and Eric Stein
Publication Date: Jul 14, 2015
List Price: $16.99
Format: Hardcover, 32 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Picture Book
ISBN13: 9780763665937
Imprint: Candlewick Press
Publisher: Walker Books
Parent Company: Walker Books
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Nominee - Children
New Shoes
by Susan Meyer
Publication Date: Jan 30, 2015
List Price: $16.95
Format: Hardcover, 40 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Picture Book
ISBN13: 9780823425280
Imprint: Holiday House
Publisher: Holiday House
Parent Company: Holiday House, Inc.
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Nominee - Children
Chasing Freedom: The Life Journeys of Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, Inspired by Historical Facts
by Nikki Grimes
Publication Date: Jan 06, 2015
List Price: $18.99
Format: Hardcover, 56 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9780439793384
Imprint: Orchard Books
Publisher: Orchard Books
Parent Company: Orchard Books
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Winner - Debut Author
The Fishermen: A Novel
by Chigozie Obioma
- 2 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 1 Book Club’s Reading List
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2015
Publication Date: Apr 14, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780316338370
Imprint: Little, Brown and Company
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Parent Company: Hachette Livre
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Nominee - Debut Author
The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken
by Wendell Pierce and Rod Dreher
Publication Date: Sep 08, 2015
List Price: $27.95
Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781594633232
Imprint: Riverhead Books
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans, devastating many of the city’s neighborhoods, including Pontchartrain Park, the home of Wendell Pierce’s family and the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans. The hurricane breached many of the city’s levees, and the resulting flooding submerged Pontchartrain Park under as much as 20 feet of water. Katrina left New Orleans later that day, but for the next three days the water kept relentlessly gushing into the city, plunging eighty percent of New Orleans under water. Nearly 1,500 people were killed. Half the houses in the city had four feet of water in them—or more. There was no electricity or clean water in the city; looting and the breakdown of civil order soon followed. Tens of thousands of New Orleanians were stranded in the city, with no way out; many more evacuees were displaced, with no way back in.
Pierce and his family were some of the lucky ones: They survived and were able to ride out the storm at a relative’s house 70 miles away. When they were finally allowed to return, they found their family home in tatters, their neighborhood decimated. Heartbroken but resilient, Pierce vowed to help rebuild, and not just his family’s home, but all of Pontchartrain Park.
In this powerful and redemptive narrative, Pierce brings together the stories of his family, his city, and his history, why they are all worth saving and the critical importance art played in reuniting and revitalizing this unique American city.
Nominee - Debut Author
The Turner House
by Angela Flournoy
Publication Date: Apr 14, 2015
List Price: $23.00
Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780544303164
Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Parent Company: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family.
The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts and shapes their family’s future.
Praised by Ayana Mathis as “utterly moving” and “un-putdownable,” The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It’s a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.
Nominee - Debut Author
The Star Side of Bird Hill
by Naomi Jackson
Publication Date: Jun 30, 2015
List Price: $25.95
Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781594205958
Imprint: Penguin Press
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in this stunning debut novel.
This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah.
Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life.
This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.
Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family.
Nominee - Debut Author
The Presidency in Black and White: My Up-Close View of Three Presidents and Race in America
by April Ryan
Publication Date: Feb 15, 2015
List Price: $24.95
Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781442238411
Imprint: Rowman & Littlefield
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Parent Company: Rowman & Littlefield
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Winner - Fiction
Stand Your Ground: A Novel
by Victoria Christopher Murray
- 3 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 5 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
Publication Date: Jun 01, 2015
List Price: $16.00
Format: Paperback, 368 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781476792996
Imprint: Touchstone
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: CBS Corporation
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From the AALBC.com bestselling and award-winning author Victoria Christopher Murray comes Stand Your Ground, a new novel about two women who are faced with the same tragedy.
A black teenage boy is dead. A white man shot him. Was he standing his ground or was it murder?
Janice Johnson is living every black mother’s nightmare. Her seventeen-year-old son was murdered and the shooter has not been arrested. Can the D.A. and the police be trusted to investigate and do the right thing? Should Janice take advantage of the public outcry and join her husband alongside the angry protestors who are out for revenge?
Meredith Spencer is married to the man accused of the killing and she sees her husband and the situation with far more clarity than anyone realizes. What she knows could blow the case wide open, but what will that mean for her life and that of her son? Will she have the courage to come forward in time so that justice can be done?
#1 national bestselling and award-winning author Victoria Christopher Murray’s Stand Your Ground is a pulse-pounding meditation on race, motherhood, marriage, and vigilante justice that will have readers spellbound until its shocking end.
Nominee - Fiction
Under the Udala Trees
by Chinelo Okparanta
Publication Date: Sep 22, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780544003446
Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Parent Company: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.
As Edwidge Danticat has made Under the Udala Treesuses one woman’s lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope — a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.
Acclaimed byVogue, theFinancial Times,and many others, Chinelo Okparanta continues to distill experience into something crystalline, stark but lustrous (New York Times Book Review).Under the Udala Treesmarks the further rise of a star whose tales will break your heart open (New York Daily News).
Nominee - Fiction
Ghost Summer: Stories
by Tananarive Due
- 1 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 1 Book Club’s Reading List
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
Publication Date: Sep 01, 2015
List Price: $15.95
Format: Paperback, 256 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781607014539
Imprint: Prime Books
Publisher: Prime Books
Parent Company: Prime Books
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“Ms. Due accomplishes the hardest thing of all with deceptive ease, creating characters we care about on their most human level.” —Stephen King “In these extraordinary tales, American Book Award-winner Due (My Soul to Take) uses a clear-eyed view of history to explain (but never excuse) the present.” Weekly (Starred) Named one of Publishers Weekly Top 10 Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror titles for the fall! Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence bestselling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by Otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and fifteen stories-one of which has never been published before-Ghost Summer: Stories, is sure to both haunt and delight. The title novella, “Ghost Summer, won a Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society (originally published in The Ancestors). This collection includes “Patient Zero”, “The Lake”, “The Knowing”, “Herd” Immunity”, and many other stories. With an Introduction by Nalo Hopkinson and an Afterword by Steven Barnes.
Nominee - Fiction
Mama’s Boy
by ReShonda Tate Billingsley
- 2 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 1 Book Club’s Reading List
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
Publication Date: Jul 01, 2015
List Price: $16.00
Format: Paperback
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781476714950
Imprint: Gallery Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: CBS Corporation
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An AALBC.com Bestselling Book for May/June 2015
When her son is in trouble, a heartbroken mother finds the courage and faith to save him, in ReShonda Tate Billingsley’s powerful family drama—a novel as timely as today’s headlines.
The breaking TV news rocks Jasper, Texas, to the core: a white police officer is fatally shot in a scuffle with three black youths—and a cellphone video captures Jamal Jones, the sixteen-year-old son of esteemed Reverend Elton Jones, escalating the tragic encounter. Now, as the national spotlight shines on a town already rife with racial tension, Jamal is a murder suspect on the run. And all of Jasper—even the Reverend’s congregation—rushes to judge the boy they thought they knew.
But Gloria Jones knows her son best, and she races to find Jamal before the law does—to the outrage of her workaholic husband. Once she finds him, she has to decide whether to turn him in or help him run. With ruthless prosecutor and Houston mayoral candidate Kay Christensen hungering to put another young thug behind bars, Gloria will face her biggest battle yet. And when long-hidden secrets and shocking lies come to light, throwing Jamal’s case and his destiny into a tailspin, all Gloria can do is pray that the truth—and a mother’s unconditional love—will be enough to redeem the mistakes of the past and ultimately, save her son.
Nominee - Fiction
Driving The King: A Novel
by Ravi Howard
Publication Date: Jan 06, 2015
List Price: $25.99
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780060529611
Imprint: Harper
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corporation
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A daring and brilliant novel that explores race and class in 1950s America, witnessed through the experiences of Nat King Cole and his driver, Nat Weary.The war is over, the soldiers are returning, and Nat King Cole is back in his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, for a rare performance. His childhood friend, Nat Weary, plans to propose to his sweetheart, and the singer will honor their moment with a special song. While the world has changed, segregated Jim Crow Montgomery remains the same. When a white man attacks Cole with a pipe, Weary leaps from the audience to defend him—an act that will lead to a ten-year prison sentence.But the singer will not forget his friend and the sacrifice he made. Six months before Weary is released, he receives a remarkable offer: will he be Nat King Cole’s driver and bodyguard in L.A.? It is the promise of a new life removed from the terror, violence, and degradation of Jim Crow Alabama.Weary discovers that, while Los Angeles is far different from the Deep South, it a place of discrimination, mistrust, and intolerance where a black man—even one as talented and popular as Nat King Cole—is not wholly welcome.An indelible portrait of prejudice and promise, friendship and loyalty, Driving the King is a daring look at race and class in pre-Civil Rights America, played out in the lives of two remarkable men.
Winner - Instructional
Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family
by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams
Publication Date: Feb 03, 2015
List Price: $30.00
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780804137935
Imprint: Clarkson Potter
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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In May 2012, bestselling author Alice Randall penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled Black Women and Fat, chronicling her quest to be the last fat black woman in her family. She turned to her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, for help. Together they overhauled the way they cook and eat, translating recipes and traditions handed down by generations of black women into easy, affordable, and healthful—yet still indulgent—dishes, such as Peanut Chicken Stew, Red Bean and Brown Rice Creole Salad, Fiery Green Beans, and Sinless Sweet Potato Pie. Soul Food Love relates the authors’ fascinating family history (which mirrors that of much of black America in the twentieth century), explores the often fraught relationship African-American women have had with food, and forges a powerful new way forward that honors their cultural and culinary heritage. This is what the strong black kitchen looks like in the twenty-first century.
Nominee - Instructional
Keep Calm… It’s Just Real Estate: Your No-Stress Guide to Buying a Home
by Egypt Sherrod
Publication Date: Mar 10, 2015
List Price: $16.00
Format: Paperback, 224 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780762457557
Imprint: Running Press
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Parent Company: Hachette Livre
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Nominee - Instructional
Grandbaby Cakes: Modern Recipes, Vintage Charm, Soulful Memories
by Jocelyn Delk Adams
Publication Date: Sep 01, 2015
List Price: $22.95
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781572841734
Imprint: Agate Surrey
Publisher: Agate Publishing Inc
Parent Company: Agate Publishing Inc
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Nominee - Instructional
Free Your Mind: An African American Guide to Meditation and Freedom
by Cortez R. Rainey
Publication Date: Jul 16, 2015
List Price: $16.50
Format: Paperback, 478 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781492769200
Imprint: CreateSpace
Publisher: On-Demand Publishing LLC
Parent Company: Amazon.com, Inc.
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Nominee - Instructional
Big Words to Little Me: Advice to the Younger Self
by Sakina Ibrahim, Jessie Lee, and Rah Crawford
Publication Date: May 26, 2015
List Price: $18.99
Format: Paperback, 78 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781512388909
Imprint: CreateSpace
Publisher: On-Demand Publishing LLC
Parent Company: Amazon.com, Inc.
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Winner - Nonfiction
Spectacle: The Astonishing Life Of Ota Benga
by Pamela Newkirk
Publication Date: Jun 01, 2015
List Price: $25.99
Format: Hardcover
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780062201003
Imprint: Amistad
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corporation
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An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid.
In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe.
Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior, while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic life, from Africa to St. Louis to New York, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.
Illuminating this unimaginable event, Spectacle charts the evolution of science and race relations in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, exploring this racially fraught era for Africa-Americans and the rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn they endured, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Shocking and compelling Spectacle is a masterful work of social history that raises difficult questions about racial prejudice and discrimination that continue to haunt us today.
Nominee - Nonfiction
The Light Of The World: A Memoir
by Elizabeth Alexander
Publication Date: Apr 21, 2015
List Price: $26.00
Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781455599875
Imprint: Grand Central Publishing
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Parent Company: Hachette Livre
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New York Times BestsellerNew York Times Book Review Editor’s ChoiceAmazon’s Best Books of the Month, April 2015IndieBound Indie Next #1 Pick, May 2015Washington Post’s "21 Books We’ve Loved So Far This Year" PickBuzzfeed’s "53 Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down" PickGOOP’s "The Best Summer ’15 Reading" Pick
A deeply resonant memoir for anyone who has loved and lost, from acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander.
In THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid price, Alexander tells a love story that is, itself, a story of loss. As she reflects on the beauty of her married life, the trauma resulting from her husband’s death, and the solace found in caring for her two teenage sons, Alexander universalizes a very personal quest for meaning and acceptance in the wake of loss.
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD is at once an endlessly compelling memoir and a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of love, family, art, and community. It is also a lyrical celebration of a life well-lived and a paean to the priceless gift of human companionship. For those who have loved and lost, or for anyone who cares what matters most, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD is required reading.
Nominee - Nonfiction
Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America
by Wil Haygood
Publication Date: Sep 15, 2015
List Price: $32.50
Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780307957191
Imprint: Knopf
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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Read a Description of Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America
Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this stunning new biography, award- winning author Wil Haygood surpasses the emotional impact of his inspiring best seller The Butler to detail the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past one hundred years.
Using the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, Haygood creates a provocative and moving look at Marshall’s life as well as the politicians, lawyers, activists, and others who shaped—or desperately tried to stop—the civil rights movement of the twentieth century: President Lyndon Johnson; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose scandals almost cost Marshall the Supreme Court judgeship; Harry and Harriette Moore, the Florida NAACP workers killed by the KKK; Justice J. Waties Waring, a racist lawyer from South Carolina, who, after being appointed to the federal court, became such a champion of civil rights that he was forced to flee the South; John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy; Senator Strom Thurmond, the renowned racist from South Carolina, who had a secret black mistress and child; North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, who tried to use his Constitutional expertise to block Marshall’s appointment; Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who stated that segregation was “the law of nature, the law of God”; Arkansas senator John McClellan, who, as a boy, after Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, wrote a prize-winning school essay proclaiming that Roosevelt had destroyed the integrity of the presidency; and so many others.
This galvanizing book makes clear that it is impossible to overestimate Thurgood Marshall’s lasting influence on the racial politics of our nation.
Pulitzer Prize-winning, Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed reviews Wil Haygood’s new book.
Nominee - Nonfiction
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
by Jill Leovy
Publication Date: Jan 27, 2015
List Price: $28.00
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780385529983
Imprint: Spiegel & Grau
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
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Read a Description of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE,
USA TODAY,
AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE
A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
NAMED
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Washington Post The Boston Globe
The Economist The Globe and Mail
BookPage
Kirkus Reviews On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift. Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a ghettoside killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped. Praise for Ghettoside A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement… [Jill
Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.—Dwight Garner,
The New York Times Masterful… gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.—Los Angeles Times Moving and engrossing.—San Francisco Chronicle Penetrating and heartbreaking…
Ghettoside
points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.—USA Today Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect… Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.—The Boston Globe Gritty, heart-wrenching… Everyone needs to read this book.—Michael Connelly Ghettoside is remarkable: a deep anatomy of lawlessness.—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal [Leovy writes] with grace and artistry, and controlled—but bone-deep—outrage in her new book.…
The most important book about urban violence in a generation.—The Washington Post Riveting… This timely book could not be more important.—Associated Press Leovy’s relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights—and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that black lives matter.’ —The New York Times Book Review A compelling analysis of the factors behind the epidemic of black-on-black homicide… an important book, which deserves a wide audience.—Hari Kunzru, The Guardian
Nominee - Nonfiction
50 Billion Dollar Boss: African American Women Sharing Stories of Success in Entrepreneurship and Leadership
by Kathey Porter and Andrea Hoffman
Publication Date: Nov 05, 2015
List Price: $35.00
Format: Hardcover, 178 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781137475015
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher: Macmillan
Parent Company: Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
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Read a Description of 50 Billion Dollar Boss: African American Women Sharing Stories of Success in Entrepreneurship and Leadership
African-American women continue to excel and shape society across industries. This book highlights several African American women entrepreneurs and leaders, recognizes them for their business acumen,
examines how they creatively solved business challenges and identified opportunities to grow and sustain their businesses.
Winner - Poetry
How to Be Drawn
by Terrance Hayes
Publication Date: Mar 31, 2015
List Price: $20.00
Format: Paperback, 112 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780143126881
Imprint: William Morrow
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corporation
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Read a Description of How to Be Drawn
A dazzling new collection of poetry by Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead
In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the
principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.
Nominee - Poetry
Wild Hundreds
by Nate Marshall
- A Top 10 Book in the “Poetry Books of the 21st Century” Category
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
- 2016 BCALA Literary Award
Publication Date: Sep 09, 2015
List Price: $15.95
Format: Paperback, 80 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780822963837
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Parent Company: University of Pittsburgh
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Read a Description of Wild Hundreds
Winner, 2016 BCALA Literary Award (poetry category) Winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards (poetry category) Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.
Nominee - Poetry
Redbone
by Mahogany L. Browne
Publication Date: Oct 01, 2015
List Price: $18.95
Format: Paperback, 80 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780996139083
Imprint: Aquarius Press/Willow Books
Publisher: Aquarius Press/Willow Books
Parent Company: Aquarius Press/Willow Books
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Nominee - Poetry
Reconnaissance: Poems
by Carl Phillips
Publication Date: Sep 01, 2015
List Price: $23.00
Format: Hardcover, 64 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780374248284
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publisher: Macmillan
Parent Company: Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
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Nominee - Poetry
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pitt Poetry Series)
by Ross Gay
Publication Date: Jan 07, 2015
List Price: $15.95
Format: Paperback, 112 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780822963318
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Parent Company: University of Pittsburgh
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Read a Description of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pitt Poetry Series)
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude has been "longlisted" for the National Book Award, poetry category.
Winner - Youth/Teens
X: A Novel
by Ilyasah Shabazz, Illustrated by Kekla Magoon
Publication Date: Jan 06, 2015
List Price: $16.99
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Young Adult
ISBN13: 9780763669676
Imprint: Candlewick Press
Publisher: Walker Books
Parent Company: Walker Books
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Read a Description of X: A Novel
Cowritten by Malcolm X’s daughter, this riveting and revealing novel follows the formative years of the man whose words and actions shook the world.
Malcolm Little’s parents have always told him that he can achieve anything, but from what he can tell, that’s a pack of lies—after all, his father’s been murdered, his mother’s been taken away, and his dreams of becoming a lawyer have gotten him laughed out of school. There’s no point in trying, he figures, and lured by the nightlife of Boston and New York, he escapes into a world of fancy suits, jazz, girls, and reefer. But Malcolm’s efforts to leave the past behind lead him into increasingly dangerous territory. Deep down, he knows that the freedom he’s found is only an illusion—and that he can’t run forever.
X follows Malcolm from his childhood to his imprisonment for theft at age twenty, when he found the faith that would lead him to forge a new path and command a voice that still resonates today.
Nominee - Youth/Teens
Untwine
by Edwidge Danticat
Publication Date: Sep 29, 2015
List Price: $16.99
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9780545423038
Imprint: Scholastic Press
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Parent Company: Scholastic Inc.
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Nominee - Youth/Teens
Stella by Starlight
by Sharon M. Draper
Publication Date: Jan 06, 2015
List Price: $17.99
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781442494978
Imprint: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: CBS Corporation
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Nominee - Youth/Teens
Rhythm Ride: A Road Trip Through the Motown Sound
by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Publication Date: Sep 29, 2015
List Price: $22.99
Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781596439733
Imprint: Roaring Brook Press
Publisher: Macmillan
Parent Company: Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
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Nominee - Youth/Teens
You Are Wonderfully Made: 12 Life-Changing Principles for Teen Girls to Embrace
by Gwen Richardson and Sylvia Richardson
Publication Date: Sep 29, 2015
List Price: $10.00
Format: Paperback, 102 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781517594282
Imprint: CreateSpace
Publisher: On-Demand Publishing LLC
Parent Company: Amazon.com, Inc.
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Read a Description of You Are Wonderfully Made: 12 Life-Changing Principles for Teen Girls to Embrace
Nominated for a 2016 NAACP Image Award
The teen years are challenging ones in an individual’s development, especially for girls. The teen years are pivotal as those are the years when girls can either get tripped up—by making huge mistakes—or move up—by excelling academically. Black teen girls in particular often experience even greater challenges because of the negative messages, labels, and images perpetuated by media, music videos, and popular culture.
Rather than boost the confidence of black teen girls, these negative messages can adversely affect their self-esteem and their concept of self-worth. Low self-esteem can ultimately lead them to internalize these negative labels and make a series of bad choices. By embracing these labels, negative outcomes become a self-fulfilling prophecy for far too many black teen girls.
But black teen girls have the power to reject these negative labels and embrace positive ones. You Are Wonderfully Made: 12 Life-Changing Principles for Teen Girls to Embrace empowers black teen girls with the tools they need to successfully navigate their teen years and avoid the pitfalls that can derail their futures. The book’s title is based loosely on the biblical scripture in Psalm 139:14: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’ However, the twelve universal principles in this book are not exclusive for those of the Christian faith nor are they only for black teenagers. They can be adopted by any teen girl, regardless of her family background, economic status, ethnicity, or educational achievement level. Each chapter includes a list of exercises and action steps teen girls can utilize to assist them with adopting these principles.