The American Book Awards, established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, recognize outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.
Please note: This is not an award of the American Booksellers Association. Visit the Before Columbus Foundation's website for more information.
2012
Annia Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press)
Arlene Kim, What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes? (Milkweed Editions)
Ed Bok Lee, Whorled (Coffee House Press)
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (University of Texas Press)
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press)
Shann Ray, American Masculine (Graywolf Press)
Alice Rearden, translator; Ann Fienup-Riordan, editor, Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek
Qanemciput: Our Nelson Island Stories (University of Washington Press)
Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (Free Press)
Amy Waldman, The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Mary Winegarden, The Translator’s Sister (Mayapple Press)
Kevin Young, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf)
Eugene B. Redmond, Lifetime Achievement Award
2011
Keith Gilyard, John Oliver Killens (University of Georgia Press)
Akbar Ahmed, Journey Into America (Brookings Institution Press)
Camille Dungy, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press)
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)
William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers & Classical Tradition (University of Chicago Press)
Gerald Vizenor, Shrouds of White Earth (SUNY Press)
Eric Gansworth, Extra Indians (Milkweed Editions)
Ivan Arguelles, The Death of Stalin (Beatitude Press)
Geoffrey Alan Argent, The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: The Fratricides (Penn State University Press)
Neela Vaswani, You Have Given Me a Country (Sarabande Books)
Sasha Pimentel Chacon, Insides She Swallowed (West End Press)
Miriam Jimenez Roman and Juan Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History of Culture in the United States (Duke University Press)
Carmen Gimenez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona Press)
Lifetime Achievement: John A. Williams and Luis Valdez.
2010
Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press)
Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press)
Nancy Carnevale, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945 (University of Illinois Press)
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney’s/Vintage)
Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook (City Lights)
Stephen D. Gutierrez, Live from Fresno y Los (Bear Star Press)
Victor Lavalle, The Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau)
François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated from the Chipewyan by Ron Scollon (University of Washington Press)
Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls (Viking)
Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, editors, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (University of Texas)
Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, editors, Poems for the Millennium: Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry (University of California Press)
Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems (Pacific Raven Press)
Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems (Wings Press)
Lifetime Achievement: Quincy Troupe and Katha Politt
2009
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era (Columbia University Press)
Danit Brown, Ask for a Convertible (Pantheon)
Jericho Brown, Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
José Antonio Burciaga, The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón (University of Arizona Press)
Claire Hope Cummings, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press)
Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juarez (The University of Arizona Press)
Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press)
Suheir Hammad, Breaking Poems (Cypher Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon Books)
George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press)
Patricia Santana, Ghosts of El Grullo (University of New Mexico Press)
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Wesleyan University Press)
Lifetime Achievement Award: Miguel Algarin
2008
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press) by Moustafa Bayoumi
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday) by Douglas A. Blackmon
Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804 (University of Washington Press) by Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká
All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions Inc.) by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins) by Nikki Giovanni
Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press) by C.S. Giscombe
Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly) by Angela Jackson
Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press) by L. Luis Lopez
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Tom Lutz
Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion) by Fae Myenne Ng
The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press) by Yuko Taniguchi
Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (University of Michigan Press) by Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, editor
Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press) by Frank B. Wilderson III
Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots (The New Press) by Jonathan Curiel
Lifetime Achievement Award:
J.J. Phillips, Author of Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale
2007
Daniel Cassidy, How The Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
(CounterPunch/AK Press)
Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
(Basic Books)
Rigoberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (University of Wisconsin Press)
Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains (Washington Square Press)
Ernestine Hayes, Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir (University of Arizona Press)
Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in
the Gardens of Ethnic Americans (Beacon Press)
Gary Panter, Jimbo's Inferno (Fantagraphics Books)
Jeffrey F.L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown (University of Washington Press)
Judith Roche, Wisdom of the Body (Black Heron Press)
Kali Vanbaale, The Space Between (River City Publishing)
MacKenzie Bezos, The Testing of Luther Albright (Fourth Estate)
David Diaz, The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second-Generation Mexican-American (BookSurge)
Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (Columbia University Press)
Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York University Press)
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press)
Peter Metcalfe, Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, (SEARHC Foundation)
Kevin J. Mullen, The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco (Noir Publications)
Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, editors, A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (AltaMira Press/Oyate)
2005
The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches, Bernard W. Bell
Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood, Cecelie Berry
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang
Redemption, Julie Chibbaro
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, Richard A. Clarke
The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey, Alisha S. Drabek and Karen R. Adams
The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family, Ralph M. Flores
Swimming in the American: A Memoir and Selected Writings, Hiroshi Kashiwagi
Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Country of Origin, Don Lee
Long Movie of Shadows, Lamont B. Steptoe
No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, Don West
2004
Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Ph.D.
Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a, and Asian American Fictions, A. Robert Lee
Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araña, Renato Rosaldo
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of The Sixties, Scott Saul
2003
Perma Red, Debra Magpie Earling
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg
Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California, Rick Heide, editor
Akuzilleput Igaqullghet, Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History, Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga, and Vera Metcalf, editors; compiled by Igor Krupnik and Lars Krutak
What Is This Thing Called Jazz?African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, Eric Porter
Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey, Rachel Simon
Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River, Velma WallisEditor Award: Max Rodriguez, QBR: The Black Book Review (www.qbr.com)
2002
Reading the Funnies: Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout The First Half of the Twentieth Century, Donald Phelps
Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler
2001
Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories; The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949, Amanda J. Cobb
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, Andrea Dworkin
When Living Was a Labor Camp, Diana García
Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999, Sandra M. Gilbert
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers JohnsonPhoenix Eyes and Other Stories, Russell Charles Leong
The Island of Lost Luggage, Janet McAdams
Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez
Killing Time with Strangers, W.S. Penn
Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir, Cheri Register
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire, Carolyne Wright
Editor/Publisher Award: Malcolm Margolin
Lifetime Achievement: Ted Joans; Tillie Olsen; Philip Whalen
2000
Sing When the Spirit Says Sing: Selected & New Poems 1960-1990, Jon Eckels
Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective, Emil Guillermo
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child, Elva Treviño Hart
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, Michael Patrick MacDonald
Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood, Kate Moses and Camille Peri, editors
Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity, David A.J. Richards
Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford
The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, Allan J. Ryan
Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times, Helen Thomas
Heads by Harry (as part of trilogy with Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers and Blu's Hanging), Lois-Ann Yamanaka
1999
Right Here, Right Now, Trey Ellis
The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature, Lauro Flores (editor)
What Book!?:Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop, Gary Gach (editor)
Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup'ik Eskimo Examples, Jerry Lipka, with Gerald V. Mohatt and the Ciulistet Group
First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, Judith Roche and Meg McHutchison (editors)
Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life, Luis Alberto Urrea
Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations, Brian Ward
1998
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Angela Y. Davis
The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, Scott DeVeaux
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Thomas Lynch
1997
Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life, William M. Banks
The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century, Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Race Traitor, Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey
Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands, Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth
1996
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, Glenn C. Loury
Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile, Agate Nesaule
Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution, Ron Sakolsky and Fred Weihan Ho, editors
1995
Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America, Herb Boyd and Robert L. Allen
Face of an Angel, Denise Chavez
Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, John Egerton
Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest, Marnie Mueller
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose
Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas, John Ross
Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick
1994
Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, edited by Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy
Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, Janet Campbell Hale
A Different Mirror: A Muliticultural History of America, Ronald Takaki
WOOD-HOOPOE Willie, Virginia Kroll, illustrated by Katherine Roundtree
Volunteered Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, Jill Nelson
1993
The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, Jack Beatty
Paris Connections: African-American Artists in Paris, Asake Bomani and Belvie Rooks
Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, Gerald Graff
We Gave Away a Fortune: Stories of People Who Have Devoted Themselves and Their Wealth to Peace, Justice and the Environment, Christopher Mogil and Anne Slepian, with Peter Woodrow
Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country, Katherine Peter
Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism: Volume I:Prophetic Thought in Post- Modern Times; Volume II: Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America, Cornel West
1992
Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama, William B. Branch
Belonging to the Universe, Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast with Thomas Capra
The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II, Stephen Fox
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Donna J. Haraway
A Dena'ina Legacy, K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky, edited by James Kari and Alan Boraas
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History; II: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Speigelman
To the American Indian: Reminscences of a Yurok Woman, Lucy Thompson (Che- ne-wah Weitch-ah-wah)
1991
Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory, edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer
Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile, edited by Deborah Keenan and Roseann Lloyd
Overtime: Punchin' Out with the Mill Hunk Herald, The Mill Hunk Herald
1990
Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, Paula Gunn Allen
Black Athena, Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilizations: Volume 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985, Martin Bernal
Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry, Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster, and Naomi Quinonez
Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives, James M. Freeman
Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age), Daniela Gioseffi
Symbolic Immmortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the 19th Century, Sergei Kan
The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's anthology, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, and Margarita Donnelly
Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, Hualing Nieh
Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: Family Portraits and PersonalEscapades, Itabari Njeri
The Harlem Fox, J. Raymond James and Tammany, 1920-1970, John C. Walter
1989
Eva Luna, Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott
The Exiles of Erin: 19th Century Irish American Fiction, Charles Fanning
Memory of Fire, Eduardo Galeano, translated by Cedric Belfrage
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Floating the River in Melancholy, Shuntaro Tanikawa, translated by William I. Eliot and Kazuo Kawamura (bilingual edition)
1988
Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought, Allison Blakely
The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, Charles Olson, edited by George Butterick
Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985, Edward Sanders
The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, Opal Whiteley, presented by Benjamin Hoff
1987
Liberazione della Dona: Feminism in Italy, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
Ready From Within, Septima Clark, edited by Cynthia Stokes Brown
Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, Gary Giddins
1986
The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women, edited by Helen Barolini
A Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
1985
Poets Behind Barbed Wire, edited and translated by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano Round Valley Songs, William Oandasan
Genth's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, Kohn Kuo Wei Tchen
1984
Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka
Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, Joseph Bruchac
Pie-Biter, illustrated by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and You-shan Tang, translated by Ellen Lai-shan Yeung
The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Red Nachman, Howard Schwartz
Axe Handles, Gary Snyder
1983
1982
This Passover or Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, Hilton Obenzinger
Leroy Quintana
Pre-Faces & Other Writings, Jerome Rothenberg
Shino Suite, Ronald Tanaka
Marked by Fire, Joyce Carol Thomas
Bodies & Soul, Al Young
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910- 1949, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung
1981
1980