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.
4 Books Honored by the National Book Foundation in 2009
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
It s my constitutional right! screamed Claudette Colvin as she was dragged off a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her seat to a white woman. It was March 2, 1955 nine months before Rosa Parks took a similar stand. But instead of being celebrated as Parks was, Colvin was shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that did for transportation what Brown v. The Board of Education did for education. Called unforgettable by The Wall Street Journal, this outstanding, ground-breaking account of an almost forgotten civil rights pioneer garnered praise and accolades, including a National Book Award, a Newbery Honor, and a Robert F. Sibert Book. As The New York Times said in a glowing review, Hoose finally gives [Colvin] the credit she deserves.
Speak Low: Poems
Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America s most distinctive and one of poetry s most essential contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world. These new poems are of a piece with Phillips s previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Open Interval (Pitt Poetry Series)
Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in Open Interval locate the self in the interval between body and name.
Jumped
Beloved author Rita Williams-Garcia intertwines the lives of three very different teens in this fast-paced, gritty narrative about choices and the impact that even the most seemingly insignificant ones can have. A National Book Award finalist.
One day. One huge New York City high school. Three girls, headed toward one slow-motion collision.
There s Trina, a pretty, self-involved artist who s sure she s bringing beauty and color to the lives of everyone around her, regardless of what they really think. There s Leticia, who skates by on minimal effort; she s more interested in her cell phone, her nails, and gossip than school. And there s Dominique, an angry basketball player who s been benched for low grades.
When Trina unknowingly offends Dominique, Dominique decides that it s going down after school, she s going to jump Trina. Trina has no idea. And Leticia is the only witness to Dominique s rage, the only one who could stop the beatdown from coming. But does she want to get involved in this mess?