National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles

Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last. Danez Smith, The Guardian

A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard (Poetry Foundation).

The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith s decorated career. Here, Smith s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows and of Smith s necessary voice.

Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder reaffirming Smith s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.

A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

With only the son s cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where home really is and whether they can even find it in one another.

Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.

The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the beautiful, vulnerable, honest (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.

Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.

From a generational voice that earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging Black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection!

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore about the power of inherited magic and the price we must pay to live the life we yearn for.

Our new home with its
thick walls and locked doors
wants me to stay trapped in my skin
but I am fury and flame.

Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors. While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past her mother.

Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn t even thought to ask.

But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.

For fans of You ve Reached Sam and If I Stay, a hauntingly beautiful, ultimately hopeful novel-in-verse about a girl in between life and death, by National Book Award Finalist Amber McBride.

Gospel is the Keeper of the Leaving Room a place all young people must phase through when they die. The young are never ready to leave; they need a moment to remember and a Keeper to help their wispy souls along.

When a random door opens and a Keeper named Melody arrives, their souls become entangled. Gospel s seriousness melts and Melody s fear of connection fades, but still are Keepers allowed to fall in love? Now they must find a way out of the Leaving Room and be unafraid of their love. In a novel that takes place over four minutes, National Book Award finalist Amber McBride explores connection, memory, and hope in ways that are unforgettable and poignant.

From the critically acclaimed author of All the Fighting Parts comes an empowering and defiant novel in verse in which a teen poet grapples with an unplanned pregnancy and determines what happens to her body in a world that wants to take the choice away from her.

Seventeen-year-old Truth Bangura wants nothing more than to know a life beyond her hometown. Writing and performing is her only solace in a life overwhelmed by a drifting relationship with her best friend, an emotionally turbulent home environment, and the reality that her below average grades make her true dream escaping her mother s grasp after graduation uncertain.

When Truth learns she s pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, she makes one decision she s finally sure about: an abortion.

Determined to move forward, Truth turns to the pages in her notebook with the support of her slam poetry team including the poet with a voice smooth as summer jazz, who s been catching her eye during practice.

At an open mic night, Truth finally gains the courage to perform a piece that dives into her rocky relationship with her mother and reveals the choice she never told her. But when a video of Truth s performance is posted online and starts going viral, her decision quickly becomes everyone s business including her mother s.

Told through searing free-verse, journal entries, and interspersed fill-in-the-blank poetry prompts, Hannah V. Sawyerr s Truth Is reminds us there is always a choice. There is always hope. And there is always a way forward.

Finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Named a most anticipated book by New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, People Magazine, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Hub

Wonderfully ambitious . Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book. Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January s got a relationship with a good man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000 s into the late 2020 s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

A New York Times Editors Choice Pick

Powerful [and] fascinating. The Washington Post

The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him.

As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people was on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears.

McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land.

In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didn t, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black people s attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.

From Whiting Award Winner Rickey Laurentiis, a Mythic, Lyric, Decade-in-the-Making New Collection of Masterful Poems that Probe the Meanings of Trans/formation and Re-creation, a New Classic about Gender and Love

When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. Call Rickey Laurentiis stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity, Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis s poetics from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.

Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire. With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. You see something in me, she writes, something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.

In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

In Gbenga Adesina s groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage.

In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.

From acclaimed author K. Ancrum comes a queer romantic thriller in which the lives of Hollis, a boy in search of meaning, and Walt, a spirit with unfinished business, collide when Walt takes possession of Hollis s body and maybe his heart. For fans of Adam Silvera and Aiden Thomas!

A School Library Journal 2025 Stars So Far list pick!

Hollis Brown is stuck. Born to a blue-collar American Dream, Hollis lives in a rotting small town where no one can afford to leave. Hollis s only bright spots are his two best friends, cool girls Annie and Yulia, and the thrill of fighting his classmates.

As if his circumstances couldn t get worse, a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger named Walt results in a frightening trap. After unknowingly making a deal at the crossroads, Hollis finds himself losing control of his body and mind, falling victim to possession. Walt, the ghost making a home inside him, has a deep and violent history rooted in the town Hollis grew up in and he has unfinished business to take care of.

As Walt and Hollis begin working together to put Walt s spirit to rest, an unspeakable bond forms between them, and the boys begin falling for one another in unexpected ways. But it s only a matter of time before Hollis s best friends begin to notice that something about Hollis isn t quite right.

With the threat of a long-overdue exorcism looming before them, will Walt and Hollis be able to protect their love and undo the curse that turned their town from a garden of possibility into a place where dreams go to die?

In this poignant mixed voice, mixed form collection of interconnected prose, poems and stories, teen characters, their families, and their communities grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst fear and loss, these New York City teens prevail with love, resilience and hope. From the award-winning author of Chlorine Sky and Vinyl Moon.

[A] gorgeous, tender testament to the generation of young people who shouldered the pandemic.
Brendan Kiely, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author

Grief, pain, hope, and love collide in this short story collection.

In New York City, teens, their families, and their communities feel the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the fear and loss, these teens and the adults around them persevere with love and hope while living in difficult circumstances:

• Malachi writes an Armageddon short story inspired by his pandemic reality.
• Tariq helps their ailing grandmother survive during quarantine.
• Zamira struggles with depression and loneliness after losing her parents.
• Mohamed tries to help keep his community spirit alive.
• A social worker reflects on the ways the foster system fails their children.

From award-winning author Mahogany L. Browne comes a poignant collection of interconnected prose, poems, and lists about the humanity and resilience of New Yorkers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Derrick Barnes takes all forms of storytelling available to him­ allegory, folktales, and classics to weave a novel that is empowered, empowering, and incredibly human. You won t be the same after reading it.
Erin Entrada Kelly, two-time winner of the Newbery Medal

National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honoree Derrick Barnes tackles timely issues of race and prejudice in this powerful, nuanced novel about an accomplished Black boy who strives to be seen as human.

In the small town of Great Mountain, Mississippi, all eyes are on Henson Blayze, a thirteen-year-old football phenom whose talents seem almost superhuman. The predominately white townsfolk have been waiting for Henson to play high-school ball, and now they re overjoyed to finally possess an elite Black athlete of their own.

Until a horrifying incident forces Henson to speak out about injustice.
Until he says that he might not play football anymore.
Until he quickly learns he isn t as loved by the people as he thought.

In that moment, Henson s town is divided into two chaotic sides when all he wants is justice. Even his best friends and his father can t see eye to eye. When he is told to play ball again or else, Henson must decide whether he was born to entertain people who may not even see him as human, or if he s destined for a different kind of greatness.

Written for children ages 10 and up, Derrick Barnes s groundbreaking novel masterfully combines a modern-day allegory with classic-style tall tales to weave a compelling story of America s obsession with relegating Black people to labor or entertainment. Spanning the 1800s to today, this exceptional story shows how much has changed over centuries and, at the same time, how little.