CELEBRATING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEES FOR NONFICTION

DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA is a citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop and is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best Travel Writing, and other outlets. Her memoir, Whiskey Tender (Harper), has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in nonfiction, as well as named to several 2024 best lists at outlets such as Esquire, Oprah Daily, Elle, and The Washington Post.

ELIZA GRISWOLD is the author of Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers religion, politics, and the environment. Griswold has been writing for the magazine since 2003. Also a poet and a translator, she has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others, and has received awards including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. She is a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she directs the program in journalism.

ERNEST SCHEYDER is a senior correspondent for Reuters covering the green energy transition and the minerals that undergird it. He previously covered the U.S. shale oil revolution, politics, and the environment, and held roles at The Associated Press and Bangor Daily News. A native of Maine, Scheyder is a graduate of the University of Maine and Columbia Journalism School.

JASON DE LEÓN is a professor of anthropology and Chicana/o studies and director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also helping families of missing migrants reunite with their loved ones. De León is a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the author of the award-winning book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California Press).

REBECCA BOYLE is a columnist at Atlas Obscura and a contributor to Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Popular Science, Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine, and many other publications. She is a member of the group science blog The Last Word on Nothing. Boyle was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the recipient of numerous writing awards. Her work has been anthologized three times in The Best American Science & Nature Writing. She is a former Space Camp attendee and lifelong moon enthusiast.

RUTH DICKEY is the executive director of the National Book Foundation and has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. She was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and served as a judge in fiction for the 2019 National Book Awards.