National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles

The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black, about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America s own.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Hurricane Staxxx Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar s path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a new and necessary American voice (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).

A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America.

In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.

In "Due North," an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In "Who s Down?" a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In "Candy for Hanif" a mother s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In "Woman in Niqab," a daughter s suspicion of her father s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In "New Mexico," a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home.

With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it s the errors that make us human.

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. I learned to see in my mother s house, writes Sharpe. I learned how not to see in my mother s house My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words. Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method, collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness, and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

Evie Shockley s New Poetry Collection

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

perched

i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.

if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.

after Alison Saar s Blue Bird

Stunningly realized Exquisite A spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal of others, and oneself. Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

One of the Los Angeles Times s most anticipated books of the fall

The thrilling and deeply moving new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.

Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman s name: Maram.

The key to this mysterious woman s identity is Adanson s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.

Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop s Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal s oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

On a Woman s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society s expectations.

Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. ""I m Noenka,"" she responds resolutely, ""which means Never Again.""

Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award

Measuring almost 12 by 10 inches this big children s book is gorgeous visually, in word, and intent. Troy D. Johnson, Founder of the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC)

A New York Times Bestseller
A Kids Indie Next List Pick
A Publishers Weekly Summer Reading List Pick
An Amazon Best Book of the Month

Praised for acting like a big girl when she is small, as a young girl grows, big becomes a word of criticism, until the girl realizes that she is fine just the way she is.

From a New York Times bestselling and award-winning creator, this deeply moving story shares valuable lessons about fitting in, standing out, and the beauty of joyful acceptance.

Big is the first picture book both written and illustrated by award-winning artist Vashti Harrison. Big traces a child s journey to self-love and shows the power of words to both hurt and heal. With spare text and exquisite illustrations, this emotional exploration of being big in a world that prizes small is a tender portrayal of how you can stand out and feel invisible at the same time.

An extraordinary and unforgettable short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness from a writer whose spellbinding, buoyant * storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds. *Texas Monthly

In Holler, Child s eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something hope, reconciliation, freedom.

In Cutting Horse, the appearance of a horse in a man s suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In Holler, Child, a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side. And Time After shows us the unshakable bonds of family as a sister journeys to find her estranged brother the one who saved her many times over.

Throughout Holler, Child, we see love lost and gained, and grief turned to hope. Much like LaToya Watkins s acclaimed debut novel, Perish, this collection peers deeply into lives of women and men experiencing intimate and magnificent reckonings exploring how race, power, and inequality map on the individual, and demonstrating the mythic proportions of everyday life.

A poignant and compelling re-examination of a tragic era in America history insightful and deeply moving. Bryan Stevenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Just Mercy

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey s exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.

When Crack Was King follows four individuals to give us a startling portrait of crack s destruction and devastating legacy: Elgin Swift, an archetype of American industry and ambition and the son of a crack-addicted father who turned their home into a "crack house"; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an early advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist, basketball prodigy, and a founding member of the Zoo Crew, Newark s most legendary group of drug traffickers.

Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

For readers of Carol Anderson, Tiya Miles, and Clint Smith, I Saw Death Coming is an indelible and essential book that speaks to some of the most pressing questions of our times.

From a groundbreaking scholar, a heart-wrenching reexamination of the struggle for survival in the Reconstruction-era South, and what it cost.

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.

In I Saw Death Coming, Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades indeed, generations to come.

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection s center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles Shanahan s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

A gripping literary mystery in the vein of Bolaño s Savage Detectives, this coming-of-age novel unravels the fascinating life of a maligned Black author, based on Yambo Ouologuem.

The first Sub-Saharan African winner of France s top literary prize, the Goncourt.

In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, discovers a legendary book from the 1930s, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the "Black Rimbaud," after the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery, Diégane decides to search for T.C. Elimane, going down a path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust.

Alongside his investigation, Diégane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. Together they talk, drink, make love, and philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diégane grows particularly close to two women: the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aïda, impossible to pin down.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, it is an ode to literature and its timelessness.

Hailed as an essential reeducation on one of the most consequential events in US history by Ibram X. Kendi,, this gripping middle-grade account offers a fresh look at the groundbreaking 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by spotlighting the protest s radical roots and the underappreciated role of Black women includes a wealth of contemporary black-and-white photos throughout.

Six decades ago, on August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom a moment often revered as the culmination of this Black-led protest. But at its core, the March on Washington was not a beautiful dream of future integration; it was a mass outcry for jobs and freedom NOW not at some undetermined point in the future. It was a revolutionary march with its own controversies and problems, the themes of which still resonate to this day.

Without diminishing the words of Dr. King, More Than a Dream looks at the march through a wider lens, using Black newspaper reports as a primary resource, recognizing the overlooked work of socialist organizers and Black women protesters, and repositioning this momentous day as radical in its roots, methods, demands, and results. From Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long, the acclaimed authors of Call Him Jack, comes a classic-in-the-making that will transform our modern understanding of this legendary event in the fight for racial justice and civil rights.