Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Nominees: Nonfiction

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Margaret Atwood calls Forché’s newest book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press), “Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension. What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others.

Elizabeth Flock is a reporter and producer for the PBS NewsHour. She is the author of The Heart is a Shifting Sea, which won a Nautilus Book Award. Her features and investigations have appeared on the PBS NewsHour, in the New York Times, the Atlantic and in many other publications.

A New York Times best-selling author, Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed poet and cultural critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, MTV News, and other outlets. He is the author of the highly praised poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much and the essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. He is currently at work on They Don't Dance No Mo', a history of black performance in the United States. He is the author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press), the New York Times calls it, "Warm, immediate and intensely personal." Abdurraqib traces the seminal rap group’s creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Taylor’s writing has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and beyond. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (The University of North Carolina Press) was nominated for a National Book Award in Nonfiction. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. They passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation’s first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Sarah M. Broom’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and O, The Oprah magazine among others. She received her Master’s in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She is author of The Yellow House (Grove Press).  In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.