In Conversation: 72nd Annual National Book Award Winners

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata won the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and both A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir and What Became of the White Savage by François Garde won PEN Translates awards. Her latest translation, Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Jason Mott has published four novels. His first novel, The Returned, was a New York Times bestseller and was turned into a television series. He has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals. His most recent novel, Hell of a Book, is the Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.

Malinda Lo is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of several novels, including most recently A Line in the Dark, which was a Kirkus and Vulture best young adult book of the year. Her novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award, the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda’s nonfiction has been published by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, Huffington Post, The Toast, Horn Book Magazine, and the anthologies Here We Are, How I Resist, and Scratch. Her most recent novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, won the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and The Republic of Poetry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts. Floaters, his most recent collection, won the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry.

Ruth Dickey has spent 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. She is the author of Sky Ceilings (Pudding House Press) and the chapbook Paper Houses, and her work has appeared widely in print publications, including Alimentum, Baltimore Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Ocean State Review, Potomac Review, and Sonora Review. A voracious reader, she was a co-founder of mothertongue, a community-based organization that works to create a safe space where all women may speak freely, and has taught poetry workshops in soup kitchens, drop-in centers, and D.C. public schools.

Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series. Her most recent book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake, won the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction.