Winners

Deacon King Kong […] is robust and funny, confronting tragedy with an ebullient comic spirit, “pulling its punches” in unexpected ways that repudiate disaster and resound just right.

My parents speak two different Bantu languages, and even my sister and I speak different languages; so, we all speak to each other in English. We speak Nyanja, Namwanga, Mambwe and Bemba. I tend, when I think in Zambian words, to think in Bemba, not Nyanja.

There’s been a lot of reservation literature written. I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other Native people struggle, with identity and authenticity.

Growing up in DeLisle, Mississippi has influenced me in many ways. Growing up here taught me to appreciate beauty, the beauty of the bayous and of the forests and of the Gulf. Growing up in this community taught me to appreciate storytelling, taught me to appreciate language.

This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world in 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.

‘The Fortunes’ bends genre and race in ways that make it “a prophetic work in 2017,” according to Joyce Carol Oates.

Morris is deeply interested in the tensions of home and away, which can be seen in the immigrant and Great Migration characters populating “The Jazz Palace,” both fictional and actual.

An epic chorus-in-the-round, with some 30 narrators, each in various patois, telling their story as it intersects with the Singer, as James calls the reggae legend over these 700 pages.

Marra takes his title from a medical dictionary definition of life and his inspiration, in part, from the fact that no previous English language novel was set in a region that has been fertile soil for Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov and Alexandr Pushkin.

A marvelous, nuanced, polyphonic exploration of the life of boxer Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight world champion.

A vivid, fast-paced book that looks at Filipino heritage, samurai, fathers, masculinity, and memory.

Writer Kevin Powers, who joined the Army at age 17 and served as a machine gunner in Iraq, creates a tightly focused, hypnotic story that spirals around his central character’s isolation. Powers has created a piercing portrayal of war.

In understated prose, the story tells of two slave sisters who turn tables on their mistress and take her captive after her Kentucky farmer husband dies.

Loyalties were always mixed and the world inside the walls of my home was significantly different from the world beyond it.

‘Great House,’ her third novel, was a finalist for a National Book Award for Fiction, short-listed for the Orange Prize, and featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

A graduate of Marquette University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stefaniak has taught in the Master of Fine Arts programs at Pacific University in Oregon and the University of Nebraska.

‘Burnt Shadows,’ her fifth novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction and won the Danish Literature Prize ALOA-2010.

Erdrich plays individual narratives off one another, dropping apparently insignificant clues that build to head-slapping revelations as fates intertwine and the person responsible for the 1911 killing is identified.

Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory […] and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.

His first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award for best fiction of 2007, the Mercantile Library Center’s John Sargent Prize for First Novel in 2007, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

After September 11, the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, Hamid took a leave of absence from his McKinsey & Company job and returned to Pakistan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and on his second novel, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist.’

Her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” also the title of one of her short stories, is set before and during the Biafran War.

‘Blue Front,’ the book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old in Cairo, Illinois, was also chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library and won an Ohioana Book Award.

‘On Beauty’ was recognized with the Orange Prize for Fiction and The Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section). In addition, the novel was short listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2005.

‘The Dew Breaker’ is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption.

Impossible to rush through, “The Known World” is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

Stephen L. Carter has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American politics and culture to the impact of integrity and civility in our daily lives.

Her awards include a 1999 Pushcart Prize, a 1998 Poets & Writers Exchange Program’s Discovery award, a “Discovery”/The Nation award, fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Smart, learned and soaringly ambitious, his second novel consolidates his position as one of the leading writers of serious fiction of his generation.

By exploring his own experiences as a second-generation Korean-born American, Lee’s novels portray the tensions between assimilation into a society and alienation from oneself and one’s heritage. 

Raised in rural New Hampshire, Banks initially planned to follow his father into the plumbing business; where he grew up, he told an interviewer, ‘the idea of being a writer was like the idea of being a butterfly.’

Although Mosley’s fiction falls into a category that many consider subliterary—detective fiction—his depth of character, researched historical details, and realistic dialogue transcend the cliches of the genre.

The experience of losing one’s birth mother becomes a metaphor for the detachment from one’s mother country. The novel is a chilling and tight monologue, a haunting expression of the protagonist’s isolation.

Bell dips into the chaos like a colonial Bret Easton Ellis, providing us all the details with an almost deviant relish. It’s only when the noble slave Touissant Louverture takes control of the African mob that a bit of civility returns to the war-torn country.

Timely in the subject of interracial love, this authentic, richly detailed novel plumbs sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one’s identity, bringing the anguish of the two young lovers to life.

Her stories celebrate, mourn, and honor Latinas, collectively and individually, and also consider the influential men in her own life: the author’s beloved, unknowable, philandering father; the first boy she loved; her heartbreakingly deteriorating grandfather.

Her work delves into the unheralded inner lives of women through chronicles of migration, urban dislocation and deprivation in borderland arroyos and urban barrios. Cisneros captures the deepest existential concerns and struggles of women.

Told in an earthy and uncontrived dialect, these memorable poems offer, not remote, idealized victims, but American black women of the 19th century making folksong poetry out of a terrible destiny: to be denied freedom, dignity, and humanity.

In her novels and short stories Gordimer has captured the “flesh and blood of individual behavior” in minute and sentient detail, chronicling daily life in South Africa under apartheid, and portraying the human face of resistance.

Above all, Morrison is known for her rich, lyrical prose, which fuses the rhythms and imagery of African American speech and music with other literary influences to create a discourse of its own.

An Orphic voyage into memory and mirage, through passages between death and life, darkness and light, oppression and flight, sense and the sensed.

Brooks created a unique poetic voice that grappled with issues of art, identity, race, gender, and the relation between literature and popular culture.

As a poet, playwright, fiction writer, autobiographer, and anthologist, Hughes captured the moods and rhythms of the black communities he knew and loved—and translated those rhythms to the printed page.

John Richard Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage.

When his first novel, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” was published in 1948, the reviews hailed it as ‘beautiful and profoundly moving […] steeped in sadness and grief but radiant with hope and compassion.’

It is one of the best—and earliest—views of breaking the color line as well as a touching love story of a man and woman of different races.

By writing in the language of all Jews about everyday Jewish life, Sholem Asch, along with other pioneers of Yiddish literature, sought to preserve a sense of culture and community among his kinsmen despite their dispersal throughout the world and lack of a common homeland.

With rare perceptiveness, Gwethalyn Graham takes the reader into the lives of Erica Drake and Marc Reiser, whose two worlds are separated by families and conventions. Here is the story of a man and woman who dared earth and high heaven to make their vision real.