The Cleveland Foundation announced the winners of its annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which recognize “literature that confronts racism and explores diversity.”
Author and journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault was given a lifetime achievement award; her books include In My Place, To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement, and My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chair of the prize jury, praised Hunter-Gault for remaking the U.S. “with her courage and her nuanced reporting.”
Geraldine Brooks won one of the prizes for Horse, the novel that a Kirkus critic praised for “strong storytelling in service of a stinging moral message.” The other novel taking home an award was The Family Chao, the latest from University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang.
Matthew F. Delmont was named a winner for his nonfiction book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. Saeed Jones, who won the Kirkus Prize for his 2019 memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, won a prize for his latest poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World.
“These remarkable books deliver groundbreaking insights on race and diversity,” Gates said. “This year, we honor a profound and funny novel centered in a Chinese restaurant, a brilliant story of 19th-century horseracing with contemporary echoes, a stunning poetry collection that captures who we are now, and a meticulous history that recasts our understanding of World War II.”
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were established in 1935. Past winners have included Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
