An Evening With the National Book Awards Winners and Finalists

Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law, where he specializes in American constitutional law. His scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Atlantic, Slate, and Scotusblog. His latest book,We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright), shortlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, chronicles the revelatory story of one of the most successful, yet least known, “civil rights movements” in American history. Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation’s earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution―and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. Exposing the historical origins of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, Adam Winkler explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business. Beginning his account in the colonial era, Winkler reveals the profound influence corporations had on the birth of democracy and on the shape of the Constitution itself.

Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad, Iraq. After graduating from the University of Baghdad, she worked as a journalist and translator for the Baghdad Observer. Facing censorship and interrogation, she left Iraq, first to Jordan and then to America. She is the author of The Iraqi Nights, Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard, as well as her edited volume, 15 Iraqi Poets. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Knights Foundation grant, a Kresge Fellowship, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing and works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New Directions) is her most recent book. Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. Mikhail extensively interviews several of these women―who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been sexually abused, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons―and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

Jennifer Croft is a 2018–19 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. She is also the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship for her novel Homesick, originally written in Spanish. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the translator of Flights (Riverhead Books) by Olga Tokarczuk, Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and shortlisted for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.