National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles
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The mission of the National Book Foundation is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. National Book Awards are given in five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.
Here we highlight the winners of African descent. The first African-American writer to win a National Book Award was Ralph Ellison, in 1953, for Invisible Man.
2 Books Honored by the National Book Foundation in 2004
The Rest Of Love: Poems
Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift outstrips all diversionary maneuvers." (Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review)
The light, for as far as
I can see, is that of any number of late
afternoons I remember still: how the light
seemed a bell; how it seemed I d been living
insider it, waiting - I d heard all about
that one clear note it gives.
from "Late Apollo III"
In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren t we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we re nevertheless attracted to? Phillips s signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual.
The Rest of Love is a 2004 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
The Legend of Buddy Bush
Celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Shelia P. Moses s National Book Award finalist and Coretta Scott King Honoree, The Legend of Buddy Bush, with this new edition of a classic novel that s more relevant than ever.
The day Uncle Goodwin Buddy Bush came from Harlem all the way back home to Rehobeth Road in Rich Square, North Carolina, is the day Pattie Mae Sheals s life changes forever.
Pattie Mae adores and admires Uncle Buddy he s tall and handsome and he doesn t believe in the country stuff most people believe in, like ghosts and stepping off the sidewalk to let white folks pass. But when Buddy is arrested for a crime against a white woman that he didn t commit, Pattie Mae and her family are suddenly set to journeying on the long, hard road that leads from loss and rage to forgiveness and pride.
