Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is the only juried American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.

Join us for a weekend of opening and challenging minds as we honor the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners. Attend ou...
06/04/2026

Join us for a weekend of opening and challenging minds as we honor the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners. Attend our annual signature ceremony at the Maltz Performing Arts Center on September 18 as this year’s winners join the esteemed canon of America’s only juried book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.
Learn more here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/2026/05/anisfield-wolf-book-awards-weekend/

Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine...
06/02/2026

Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present—and how our present choices will echo for years to come.

This month, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Club is reading 2026 AWBA Fiction winner, "Make Your Way Home." Explore resources to guide your reading here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/awba-book-club/

Have you enjoyed reading Sarah Aziza's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winning memoir, "The Hollow Half?" We've put together ...
05/28/2026

Have you enjoyed reading Sarah Aziza's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winning memoir, "The Hollow Half?"

We've put together a list of books to explore next!

Heavy, Kiese Laymon
Birthright, George Abraham
Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, Ghassan Kanafani
Journal of an Ordinary Grief, Mahmoud Darwish
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe
Customs, Solmaz Sharif

Review all our Anisfield-Wolf Book Club resources for "The Hollow Half" here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/awba-book-club/

05/27/2026

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards canon includes over 260 works of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and lifetime achievement winners. This year we asked our new class of winners what titles and authors in our canon are among their favorites. Sarah Aziza, the 2026 Memoir winner for her work, "The Hollow Half," shared that Toni Morrison, winner of the 1988 Fiction AWBA for "Beloved," is one of her favorite works in the canon.

Explore more insights from Sarah Aziza here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/awba-book-club/

Nell Irvin Painter’s latest book, I Just Keeping Talking: A Life in Essays (2024), opens up with an epigraph from Elizab...
05/25/2026

Nell Irvin Painter’s latest book, I Just Keeping Talking: A Life in Essays (2024), opens up with an epigraph from Elizabeth Alexander, “Art and history are the indelibles.” It is certain that Nell Irvin Painter’s work has left an indelible mark on our understanding of race, race relations, and diversity. It is with great reverence that Painter joins the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards canon as the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Winner.

Learn more about Nell Irvin Painter's collected works here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/nell-irvin-painter/

05/21/2026

Sarah Aziza resists the traditional memoir structure of moving chronologically through her story of recovery. Instead, she offers up a spiral structure in which she repeatedly crosses space, place, and time to find a way forward.

What was your experience reading a recursive memoir? How do you think Aziza went about arranging these fragments to create an arc towards recovery?

Explore more resources for the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winning Memoir here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/awba-book-club/

At the heart of Gbenga Adesina’s haunting, elegiac collection is the stunning titular poem, Death Does Not End at the Se...
05/19/2026

At the heart of Gbenga Adesina’s haunting, elegiac collection is the stunning titular poem, Death Does Not End at the Sea, a meditation on the difficult journeys. It is a promise, Gbenga shows us, underscored by loss and longing, yet buoyed by love, the music of resilience, and the chorus of ancestral voices carried inside the living: Death is not silence, he writes. It is where I hear you most clearly.

Read AWBA Jury Chair, Natasha Trethewey's full citation for 2026 Poetry winner, Death Does Not End at the Sea, here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/

05/18/2026

"It is really important for all of us to ask ourselves what history we carry and what our responsibility is." - Sarah Aziza.

In her Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winning memoir, "The Hollow Half," Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love.

Learn more about her memoir during this month's Anisfield-Wolf Book Club: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/awba-book-club/

In Sarah Aziza’s affecting memoir, The Hollow Half, we are taken on a journey that confounds categories and reimagines t...
05/14/2026

In Sarah Aziza’s affecting memoir, The Hollow Half, we are taken on a journey that confounds categories and reimagines the tug of home. Through Aziza’s honest reporting of her struggles with disordered eating, to the tangled family history of Palestinian displacement and tenacious belonging, The Hollow Half is a model of memoir as an act of translation—a powerful attempt to write oneself into wholeness by confronting the shattered history of a culture and community divided by war, displacement, and occupation.

Read more about 2026 AWBA Memoir winner, The Hollow Half, here: https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/

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