Finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards

If you are looking for new reading recommendations, you might start with this year's finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature from the National Book Foundation.

The five finalists in each category were selected by a panel of judges; the winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 20. Each winner will receive $10,000 as well as a bronze medal and a statue; each finalist will receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and finalists in the translated literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.

Five of the twenty-five finalists are debuts, and ten of the honored books are published by independent or university presses.

POETRY

Anne Carson - Wrong Norma (New Directions)

Fady Joudah - [...] (Milkweed Editions)

m.s. RedCherries - mother (Penguin Books)

Diane Seuss - Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - Something About Living (University of Akron Press)

FICTION

’Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton)

Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! (Knopf)

Percival Everett for James (Doubleday)

Miranda July for All Fours (Riverhead Books)

Hisham Matar for My Friends (Random House)

NONFICTION

Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books)

Eliza Griswold for Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Kate Manne for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown)

Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House)

Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender (Harper)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Bothayna Al-Essa for The Book Censor’s Library (Restless Books), translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain

Linnea Axelsson for Ædnan (Knopf), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Fiston Mwanza Mujila for The Villain's Dance (Deep Vellum), translated from the French by Roland Glasser

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Samar Yazbek for Where the Wind Calls Home (World Editions) translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Violet Duncan for Buffalo Dreamer (Nancy Paulsen Books)

Josh Galarza for The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt)

Erin Entrada Kelly for The First State of Being (Greenwillow Books)

Shifa Saltagi Safadi for Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)

Angela Shanté for The Unboxing of a Black Girl (Page Street Publishing)

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Poetry at the Grammy Awards

I only recently discovered that the GRAMMY Awards added a Spoken Word Poetry Album category. 

Most poets we know do not record albums of their poems, so it may not surprise you who has been nominated for the 2023 GRAMMYs (officially known as the 65th GRAMMY Awards) to be held on February 5, 2023.

The Best Spoken Word Poetry Album nominees (several of which are marked as explicit) for albums containing greater than 50% playing time of new spoken word poetry recordings are:

1. Black Men Are Precious, Ethelbert Miller
2. Call Us What We Carry: Poems, Amanda Gorman
3. Hiding In Plain View, Malcolm-Jamal Warner
4. The Poet Who Sat By The Door, J. Ivy
5. You Will Be Someone's Ancestor. Act Accordingly, Amir Sulaiman

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2021 National Book Award Honorees for Poetry

The 2021 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry has been announced.

Nine of the ten poets on the 2021 Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees. Two of the poets have been honored by the Pulitzer Prize, and two have received Whiting Awards. Other prizes that have recognized the Longlisted poets include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Pushcart Prize. One of the books comes from a university press and nine come from independent publishers, including Parlor Press, with its first title recognized by the National Book Awards. The list features poets in all stages of their careers, including four debut poetry collections.

• Threa Almontaser, The Wild Fox of Yemen, Graywolf Press
• Baba Badji, Ghost Letters, Parlor Press
• Desiree C. Bailey, What Noise Against the Cane, Yale University Press
• CM Burroughs, Master Suffering, Tupelo Press 
• Andrés Cerpa, The Vault, Alice James Books 
• Martín Espada, Floaters, W. W. Norton & Company 
• Forrest Gander, Twice Alive, New Directions 
• Douglas Kearney, Sho, Wave Books 
• Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Wave Books 
• Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, Nightboat Books

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2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

Ada Limón - Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced that Ada Limón was awarded the poetry prize for The Carrying (Milkweed), in which Tess Taylor says “The Carrying opens a new chapter in an already beautiful and accomplished oeuvre.” 

The awards are given annually for books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, autobiography, and biography published in the previous year.

The finalists in poetry are Terrance Hayes for American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books), Erika Meitner for Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions), Diane Seuss for Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press), and Adam Zagajewski for Asymmetry, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Finalists for National Book Awards in Poetry for 2018

The finalists for the 2018 National Book Awards have been announced, and the Finalists for Poetry are:

Rae Armantrout, Wobble

Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of

Justin Phillip Reed, Indecency

Jenny Xie, Eye Level

                     

National Book Awards in Poetry

The National Book Foundation have announced its winners of National Book Awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. Each winner will be awarded $10,000, and each finalist will take home $1,000.

For Poetry, the winnner is Frank Bidart for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

FINALISTS
Leslie Harrison, The Book of Endings (University of Akron Press)

Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press)

Shane McCrae, In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press)

Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems (Graywolf Press) finalists:

         


Books on the judges' long list are:

Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, Ltd.)
Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company)
Laura Kasischke, Where Now: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
Sherod Santos, Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton & Company)
Mai Der Vang, Afterland (Graywolf Press)

The judges for poetry were Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardlo, Richard Siken, Monica Youn (Chair).

    

National Book Critics Circle Finalists for 2016

The National Book Critics Circle has announced their 30 finalists in six categories – autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – for the outstanding books of 2016.

The awards will be presented on March 16, 2017, in New York City.

The 5 finalists in poetry:

Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Wave Books)

Bernadette Mayer, Works and Days (New Directions)

Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Monica Youn, Blackacre (Graywolf Press)

National Book Awards for Poetry

As the year ends, many list are published of "the best" books in all categories. Though no list is definitive or fits all tastes, one list to look at for good titles published during the year is the National Book Awards.

Here are the 2015 poetry titles selected.


WINNER



Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus: and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)


FINALISTS

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (Penguin/Penguin Random House)

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)

Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)



ON THE AWARD LONG LIST

Scattered at Sea by Amy Gerstler

A Stranger's Mirror by Marilyn Hacker

The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts by Lawrence Raab

Sharon Olds Awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Sharon Olds has been awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her twelfth collection of poems, Stag's Leap. The collection had previously won the Eliot Prize in England.

In a recent interview, Olds spoke about writing the poems in the book which came out of a difficult time in her life as her marriage of 32 years was ending.

"I wrote these poems the way I always write, which is immediately. I have to write a poem the moment it comes to me, or sometimes half an hour later, or the next day if I’m in the middle of something. Only then do I have the feeling that is so full in me that it feels the need to spill over into an expression of itself. The poems were written in 1997, 1998 and 1999, and then maybe one in 2000 and one in 2002 and one poem may be written in 2006. But 90 percent of them were written right at the time.

In terms of this book being difficult, I really enjoy writing. I can’t sit down and just write a poem. I have to wait for it to come to me, and I’m grateful when it does, and I do the best I can with it. But it’s a pleasure – particularly the poems in this book – to take something painful and real and educational and try to make some kind of pleasure out of it – musical pleasure, or imagery pleasure, for myself, for the reader. That is fun."

Martin Espada Wins Binghamton University Poetry Book Award for THE TROUBLE BALL

I was happy to have judged this year's BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY MILT KESSLER POETRY BOOK AWARD competition.

There are 7 Kessler Award Finalists for 2012 (in alphabetical order):

• Marvin Bell for Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
• Wanda Coleman for The World Falls Away (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Toi Derricotte for The Undertaker's Daughter (University of Pittsburgh press)
• Janice Gould for Doubters and Dreamers (The University of Arizona Press)
• Joan Logghe for The Singing Bowl (University of New Mexico Press)
• Kevin Pilkington for The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree (Black Lawrence Press)

The winning selection is Martin Espada's The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton)

In The Trouble Ball,Martin Espada once again uses his clear, powerful poems to give voice to the voiceless, to those who live outside the margins and are so often unrecognized. He cries out against injustice in all its forms in poems that move from a pilgrimage to the tomb of Frederick Douglass, to an encounter with the swimming pool at a center of torture and execution in Chile and the death of an "illegal" Mexican immigrant.


On my father's island, there were hurricanes and tuberculosis, dissidents in jail
and baseball. The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos
of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King;
from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball,
The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz,
The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coímbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce;
Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches
to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball.

from "The Trouble Ball"

MARTIN ESPADA             Photo: Bryce Richter

A poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney, Martin Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for Latino rights and reclaiming the historical record. Espada's critically acclaimed collections of poetry celebrate—and lament—the immigrant and working class experience. He is the author of nine collections of poetry. His collection, The Republic of Poetry, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.