Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Nominees and Finalists in Nonfiction

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.

 

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bourgeois Radicals, and Eyes off the Prize. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. In One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing), Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans as the nation gears up for the 2018 midterm elections.

Victoria Johnson is Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. She earned her PhD in sociology from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale University. In 2015-2016, she was a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she worked on her new book, AMERICAN EDEN (Liveright 2018).