CELEBRATING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEES FOR NONFICTION

CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, she is an M.D. Anderson distinguished professor in Hispanic studies and director of the Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

JOHN VAILLANT’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

JONATHAN EIG is the author of King: A Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), the first major biography of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. in decades. A former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, he is also a New York Times bestselling author of several books, including Ali: A Life, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season.

KIDADA E. WILLIAMS is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction.

PRUDENCE PEIFFER is an art historian, writer, and editor specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is also the director of content at MoMA, New York. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, she was a senior editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and digital content director at David Zwirner in 2018. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications.