Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

External videos
External videos
	77th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, September 13, 2012, C-SPAN
	78th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, September 12, 2013, C-SPAN
	83rd annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, October 27, 2018, C-SPAN
	84th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, September 26, 2019, C-SPAN

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award is an American literary award dedicated to honoring written works that make important contributions to the understanding of racism and the appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture.^[1] Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf and originally administered by the Saturday Review, the awards have been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since 1963.

Several awards in the categories of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and lifetime achievement are given out each September in a ceremony free and open to the public and attended by the honorees. Winners include Zora Neale Hurston (1943), Langston Hughes (1954), Martin Luther King Jr. (1959), Maxine Hong Kingston (1978), Wole Soyinka (1983), Nadine Gordimer (1988), Toni Morrison (1988), Ralph Ellison (1992), Edward Said (2000), and Derek Walcott (2004).

The jury has been composed of prominent American writers and scholars at least since 1991, when long-time jury chairman Ashley Montagu, a renowned anthropologist, asked poet Rita Dove and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. to help him judge the large number of books submitted annually by publishers across the disciplines. When Montagu retired in 1996, Gates assumed the chair position. Like Gates, Rita Dove has remained a juror to this day; in 1996, she was joined by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, writer Joyce Carol Oates and historian Simon Schama. After Gould's death in 2002, psychologist Steven Pinker replaced him on the jury.

Winners

Fiction

Fiction winners^[2]
Year	Author	Title	Ref.
1945	Gwethalyn Graham	Earth and High Heaven
1947	Sholem Asch	East River
1948	Worth Tuttle Hedden	The Other Room
1949	Alan Paton	Cry, the Beloved Country
1951	John Hersey	The Wall
1954	Langston Hughes	Simple Takes a Wife
1962	Gina Allen	The Forbidden Man
1969	Gwendolyn Brooks	In the Mecca
1985	Breyten Breytenbach	Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel
1988	Nadine Gordimer	A Sport of Nature
1988	Toni Morrison	Beloved
1990	Dolores Kendrick	The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women
1993	Sandra Cisneros	Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
1994	Judith Ortiz Cofer	The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry
1995	Reginald Gibbons	Sweetbitter: A Novel
1996	Madison Smartt Bell	All Souls' Rising
1997	Jamaica Kincaid	Autobiography of My Mother
1998	Walter Mosley	Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
1999	Russell Banks	Cloudsplitter
2000	Chang-Rae Lee	A Gesture Life
2002	Colson Whitehead	John Henry Days
2003	Stephen L. Carter	The Emperor of Ocean Park
2003	Reetika Vazirani	World Hotel
2004	Edward P. Jones	The Known World
2005	Edwidge Danticat	The Dew Breaker
2006	Zadie Smith	On Beauty
2007	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	Half of a Yellow Sun
2007	Martha Collins	Blue Front
2008	Junot Diaz	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	^[3]
2008	Mohsin Hamid	The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2009	Louise Erdrich	The Plague of Doves
2009	Nam Le	The Boat
2010	Kamila Shamsie	Burnt Shadows
2011	Mary Helen Stefaniak	The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
2011	Nicole Krauss	Great House
2012	Esi Edugyan	Half-Blood Blues
2013	Eugene Gloria	My Favorite Warlord
	Laird Hunt	Kind One
	Kevin Powers	The Yellow Birds
2014	Anthony Marra	A Constellation of Vital Phenomena	^[4]
2014	Adrian Matejka	The Big Smoke
2015	Marlon James	A Brief History of Seven Killings	^[5]
2016	Mary Morris	The Jazz Palace	^[6]
2017	Peter Ho Davies	The Fortunes	^[7]
2017	Karan Mahajan	The Association of Small Bombs	^[7]
2018	Jesmyn Ward	Sing, Unburied, Sing	^[8]
2019	Tommy Orange	There There	^[9]
2020	Namwali Serpell	The Old Drift	^[10]^[11]
2021	James McBride	Deacon King Kong	^[12]
2022	Percival Everett	The Trees	^[13]^[14]
2023	Lan Samantha Chang	The Family Chao^[15]
2023	Geraldine Brooks	Horse^[16]

Poetry

Poetry winners^[2]
Year	Author	Title	Ref.
2015	Jericho Brown	The New Testament	^[5]
2015	Marilyn Chin	Hard Love Province	^[5]
2016	Rowan Ricardo Phillips	Heaven	^[6]
2017	Tyehimba Jess	Olio	^[7]
2018	Shane McCrae	In the Language of My Captor	^[8]
2019	Tracy K. Smith	Wade in the Water	^[9]
2020	Ilya Kaminsky	Deaf Republic	^[10]^[11]
2021	Victoria Chang	Obit	^[12]
2022	Donika Kelly	The Renunciations	^[14]
2023	Saeed Jones	Alive at the End of the World^[17]

Nonfiction

Nonfiction winners^[2]
Year	Author	Title	Ref.
1936	Harold Foote Gosnell	Negro Politicians: Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago
1937	Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon	We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems
1939	Ralph J. Bunche	An Analysis of the Political, Economic and Social Status of the Non-European Peoples in South Africa
1939	Charles S. Johnson	The Negro College Graduate
1940	Edward Franklin Frazier	The Negro Family in the United States
1941	Louis Adamic	From Many Lands
1942	James G. Leyburn	The Haitian People
1942	Leopold Infeld	Quest: An Autobiography
1943	Zora Neale Hurston	Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
1944	Roi Ottley	New World A-Coming
1944	Maurice Samuel	The World of Sholom Aleichem
1945	Gunnar Myrdal	An American Dilemma
1946	St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton	Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
1946	Wallace Stegner and the editors of Look	One Nation
1947	Pauline R. Kibbe	Latin Americans in Texas
1948	John Collier	The Indians of the Americas
1949	J.C. Furnas	Anatomy of Paradise
1950	S. Andhil Fineberg	Punishment Without Crime
1950	Shirley Graham	Your Most Humble Servant
1951	Henry Gibbs	Twilight in South Africa
1952	Laurens Van Der Post	Venture to the Interior
1952	Brewton Berry	Race Relations
1953	Farley Mowat	People of the Deer
1953	Han Suyin	A Many-Splendoured Thing
1954	Vernon Bartlett	Struggle for Africa
1955	Oden Meeker	Report on Africa
1955	Lyle Saunders	Cultural Differences and Medical Care
1956	John P. Dean and Alex Rosen	A Manual of Intergroup Relations
1956	George W. Shepherd	They Wait in Darkness
1957	Father Trevor Huddleston	Naught for Your Comfort
1957	Gilberto Freyre	The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization
1958	South African Institute of Race Relations	Handbook on Race Relations
1958	Jessie B. Sams	White Mother
1959	Martin Luther King Jr.	Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
1959	George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger	Racial and Cultural Minorities:: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination
1960	John Haynes Holmes	I Speak for Myself
1960	Basil Davidson	The Lost Cities of Africa
1961	E. R. Braithwaite	To Sir, With Love
1961	Louis E. Lomax	The Reluctant African
1962	Dwight L. Dumond	Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America
1962	John Howard Griffin	Black Like Me
1963	Theodosius Dobzhansky	Mankind Evolving
1964	Harold R. Isaacs	The New World of Negro Americans
	Bernard E. Olson	Faith and Prejudice
	Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan	Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
1965	Milton M. Gordon	Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins
	James M. McPherson	The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction
	Abram L. Sachar	A History of the Jews, Revised Edition
	James W. Silver	Mississippi: The Closed Society
1966	H. C. Baldry	The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought
	Claude Brown	Manchild in the Promised Land
	Malcolm X and Alex Haley	The Autobiography of Malcolm X
	Amram Scheinfeld	Your Heredity and Environment
1967	David Brion Davis	The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
1967	Oscar Lewis	La Vida
1968	Norman Rufus Colin Cohn	Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
	Robert Coles	Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear
	Raul Hilberg	The Destruction of the European Jews
	Erich Kahler	The Jews among the Nations
1969	E. Earl Baughman and W. Grant Dahlstrom	Negro and White Children: A Psychological Study in the Rural South
	Leonard Dinnerstein	The Leo Frank Case
	Stuart Levine and Nancy O. Lurie	The American Indian Today
1970	Dan T. Carter	Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South
	Vine Deloria	Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
	Florestan Fernandes	The Negro in Brazilian Society
	Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis	The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans during World War II
1971	Robert William July	A History of the African People
	Carleton Mabee	Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War
	Stan Steiner	La Raza: The Mexican Americans
	Anthony Wallace	The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca
1972	George M. Fredrickson	The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817
	John S. Haller	Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900
	Donald L. Robinson	Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820
	David Loye	The Healing of a Nation
	Naboth Mokgatle	The Autobiography of an Unknown South African
1973	Pat Conroy	The Water Is Wide
	Betty Fladeland	Men & Brothers
	Lee Rainwater	Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum
1974	Louis Leo Snyder	The Dreyfus Case: A Documentary History
	Charles Duguid	Doctor and the Aborigines
	Michel Fabre	The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright
	Albie Sachs	Justice in South Africa
1975	Eugene D. Genovese	Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
1975	Leon Poliakov	The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe
1976	Lucy S. Dawidowicz	The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945
	Thomas Kiernan	The Arabs: Their History, Aims, and Challenge to the Industrialized World
	Raphael Patai and Jennifer P. Wing	The Myth of the Jewish Race
1977	Richard Kluger	Simple Justice: A History of Brown v. Board of Education & Black America's Struggle for Equality
1977	Michi Weglyn	Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps
1978	Maxine Hong Kingston	The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
1978	Allan Chase	The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
1979	Phillip V. Tobias	The Bushmen: San Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa
1980	Richard Borshay Lee	The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society
1980	Urie Bronfenbrenner	The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design
1981	Carol Beckwith and Tepilit Ole Saitoti	Maasai
1981	Jamake Highwater	Song from the Earth: American Indian painting
1982	Geoffrey G. Field	Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain
1982	Peter J. Powell	People of the Sacred Mountain
1983	Richard Rodriguez	Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
1983	Wole Soyinka	Aké: The Years of Childhood
1984	Jose Alcina Franch	Pre-Columbian Art
1984	Humbert S. Nelli	From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans
1985	David S. Wyman	The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945
1986	Donald Alexander Downs	Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment
	James North	Freedom Rising
	Barton Wright and Clifford Bahnimptewa	Kachinas: A Hopi Artist's Documentary
1987	Arnold Rampersad	The Life of Langston Hughes
1987	Gail Sheehy	Spirit of Survival
1988	Jeffrey Jay Foxx and Walter F. Morris Jr.	Living Maya
1988	Abigail M. Thernstrom	Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights
1989	Henry Louis Gates Jr.	The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
	Taylor Branch	Parting the Waters: America in the King Years
	George Lipsitz	A Life In The Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition
	Peter Sutton	Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia
1990	Hugh Honour	The Image of the Black in Western Art: Part 1
1991	Walter A. Jackson	Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987
	Forrest G. Wood	The Arrogance Of Faith: Christianity and Race in America
	Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher, and Graham Hancock	African Ark: People and Ancient Cultures of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa
1992	Melissa Fay Greene	Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction
	Peter Hayes	Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World
	Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh	The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality
	Marilyn Nelson	The Homeplace
1993	Kwame Anthony Appiah	In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
1993	Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas	The Civilization of the Goddess
1994	David Levering Lewis	W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader
1994	Ronald Takaki	A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
1995	William H. Tucker	The Science and Politics of Racial Research
1995	Brent Staples	Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White
1996	Jonathan Kozol	Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
1997	James McBride	The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
1998	Toi Derricotte	The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey	^[18]
1999	John Lewis and Michael D'Orso	Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (about the American Civil Rights Movement)
2000	Edward W. Said	Out of Place: A Memoir
2001	David Levering Lewis	W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963
2001	F. X. Toole	Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner
2002	Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Annette Gordon-Reed	Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir
2002	Quincy Jones	Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones
2003	Samantha Power	A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
2004	Adrian Nicole LeBlanc	Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
2004	Ira Berlin	Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
2005	A. Van Jordan	Macnolia: Poems
2005	Geoffrey C. Ward	Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
2006	Jill Lepore	New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
2007	Scott Reynolds Nelson	Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry: the Untold Story of an American Legend
2008	Ayaan Hirsi Ali	Infidel: My Life^[a]	^[3]
2009	Annette Gordon-Reed	The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
2011	David Eltis and David Richardson	Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
2011	Isabel Wilkerson	The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
2012	David Livingstone Smith	Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others	^[19]
2012	David Blight	American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era	^[19]
2013	Andrew Solomon	Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
2014	Ari Shavit	My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel	^[4]
2015	Richard S. Dunn	A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Virginia and Jamaica	^[5]
2016	Lillian Faderman	The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle	^[6]
2016	Brian Seibert	What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing	^[6]
2017	Margot Lee Shetterly	Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race	^[7]
2018	Kevin Young	Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News	^[8]
2019	Andrew Delbanco	The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War	^[9]
2020	Charles King	Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century	^[10]^[11]
2021	Vincent Brown	Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of An Atlantic Slave War	^[12]
2021	Natasha Trethewey	Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir	^[12]
2022	Tiya Miles	All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake	^[13]^[14]
2022	George Makari	Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia	^[13]^[14]
2023	Matthew F. Delmont	Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad^[20]

Lifetime achievement

Lifetime achievement recipients^[2]
Year	Recipient	Ref.
1996	Dorothy West
1997	Albert L. Murray
1998	Gordon Parks
1999	John Hope Franklin
2000	Ernest Gaines
2001	Lucille Clifton
2002	Jay Wright
2003	Adrienne Kennedy
2004	Derek Walcott
2005	August Wilson
2006	William Demby
2007	Taylor Branch
2008	William Melvin Kelley	^[21]
2009	Paule Marshall
2010	Elizabeth Alexander
2010	William Julius Wilson
2010	Oprah Winfrey
2011	John Edgar Wideman
2012	Wole Soyinka
2012	Arnold Rampersad
2013	Wole Soyinka
2014	Sir Wilson Harris	^[4]
2014	George Lamming	^[4]
2015	David Brion Davis	^[5]
2016	Orlando Patterson	^[6]
2017	Isabel Allende	^[7]
2018	N. Scott Momaday	^[8]
2019	Sonia Sanchez	^[9]
2020	Eric Foner	^[10]^[11]
2021	Samuel R. Delany	^[12]
2022	Ishmael Reed	^[13]^[14]
2023	Charlayne Hunter-Gault	^[13]^[14]^[22]

Special Achievement Award

1992 – Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man^[2]

Notes

References

External links

Anisfield-Wolf.org – official website
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards at lovethebook.com

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