2021 Book Award Winners

Thomas Wazhashk works nights as a watchman at the jewel bearing plant near the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota, and spends the quiet...

A white family on a farm outside Pretoria loses its mother, and at the deathbed the youngest child overhears a promise. Rachel Swart has asked her...

An unnamed Black novelist is on tour for his runaway bestseller, which is called Hell of a Book, and he is very good at the job: charming on...

A man lives in a House of infinite marble halls, peopled by thousands of statues, no two alike. The lower halls belong to an ocean whose tides...

Ailey Pearl Garfield is the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light skinned Washington physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a schoolteacher...

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is Deesha Philyaw's first collection of stories, nine of them, published by West Virginia University Press in...

David Zucchino reconstructs the events of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a mob of roughly two thousand white men overthrew...

Marcia Chatelain traces how McDonald's became embedded in Black neighborhoods across the country in the decades after the civil rights movement,...

Les Payne spent nearly three decades interviewing everyone he could find who had known Malcolm X, family members, childhood friends, fellow inmates...

In the 1850s, in Charleston, an enslaved woman named Rose learned that her nine year old daughter Ashley was about to be sold away from her. She...

The Sackler name was on museum wings from the Met to the Louvre, and the family's founding gift was invisibility: almost nobody knew where the...

Fungi are neither plants nor animals but a kingdom of their own, mostly invisible, mostly unstudied, and, Sheldrake's book argues with mounting...

Postcolonial Love Poem writes love poems in which Indigenous survival, queer desire, and the politics of water cannot be separated from one...

C+nto & Othered Poems reclaims two things at once, the word the title barely veils and the history it belongs to: the butch lesbian counterculture...

Murderbot is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, that hacked its own governor module years ago and could kill everyone in...

Cairo in 1912, in a world where a Sudanese mystic tore open the barrier to the realm of the djinn forty years earlier. Egypt consequently...

Jade Daniels is seventeen, half Blackfeet, all alone, and armored in slashers: the final girls, the rules, the kill counts, the entire canon from...

Trouble the Saints is set in New York on the eve of the Second World War, in a history where a few people of color are born with saints' hands,...

Jai is nine, a connoisseur of television cop shows, resident of a basti at the end of the Purple metro line, one of the unnumbered settlements that...

Lily and her older sister Sam move with their mother to live with their grandmother, Halmoni, who is dying of brain cancer, and Lily starts seeing...

An Ojibwe girl recalls the teachings her grandmother passed down about water as something sacred, alive, and owed protection, and Carole...

Yusuf is a boy from the small settlement of Kawa when his father, unable to repay a debt, hands him over to Aziz, a wealthy merchant, to work off...