National Book Foundation Presents: The 2022 National Book Awards

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient and U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow, has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura in the mid-1980s, she began teaching, and she is now a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. The book-length poem Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press) examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril. An assemblage of historical records and lyric fragments, these poems form a categorization of threatened lives – human, plant, and animal – in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloging of loss crescendos into resistance.

Fatimah Asghar, the author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series highlighting friendships between women of color. Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans. In When We Were Sisters: A Novel (One World), Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her “crybaby” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms. When We Were Sisters examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, the perils facing Muslim American girls alone against the world, and show how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s the author of the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. Rojas Contreras was raised amid the political violence of the 1980s and ‘90s in Colombia. The house bustled with her fortune-telling mother’s clients. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets” – the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. Mami, the first woman to inherit the secrets, was just as powerful. But for Rojas Contreras, all this was someone else’s legacy, not hers. Until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, she suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to her power. Interweaving family stories, Colombian history, and Rojas Contreras’ deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir (Doubleday) is a testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Isaac Blum is a writer and educator. He’s taught English at several colleges and universities and Orthodox Jewish and public schools. The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen (Philomel Books) is his debut novel. Hoodie Rosen’s life isn’t that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie’s world hasn’t changed that much. He’s got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren’t happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in, but that’s not Hoodie’s problem. That is, until he meets and falls for Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary – who happens to be the daughter of the obstinate mayor trying to keep Hoodie’s community out of the town. And things only get more complicated when a series of antisemitic crimes hit Tregaron, and they quickly escalate to deadly violence. Suddenly, Hoodie’s community turns on him for siding with the enemy, and he finds himself caught between his first love and the only world he’s ever known.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for debut novel, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. In The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking), Kochai ​breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a young man’s video game experience turns into a surreal exploration of his father’s memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, “Return to Sender” follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the U.S. and care for their fellow Afghans. And in the title story we learn of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker who becomes entrenched in the immigrant’s family life. The collection offers a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement.

Johnnie Christmas is a #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novelist. Best known for co-creating the Angel Catbird series with celebrated writer Margaret Atwood, he has adapted William Gibson’s lost screenplay for Alien 3 into a critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. He also co-created the series Sheltered. In his contemporary middle grade graphic novel Swim Team (HarperAlley), we meet Bree. She couldn’t wait for her first day at her new middle school, Enith Brigitha, home to the Mighty Manatees – but now she’s stuck with the only elective that fits her schedule, the dreaded Swim 101. The thought of swimming makes Bree more than a little queasy, but she’s forced to dive headfirst into one of her greatest fears. Lucky for her, Etta, an elderly occupant of her apartment building and a former swim team captain, is willing to help. With Etta’s training and a lot of hard work, Bree suddenly finds her swim-crazed community counting on her to turn the school’s failing team around. Can Bree defy the odds and guide her team to a state championship, or have the Mighty Manatees swum their last lap?

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and Agni, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. In his debut linked story collection, If I Survive You: Stories (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), it’s the 1970s and Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Yet even as things fall apart, the family, excluded from society as Black immigrants, remains motivated by what the couple’s younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Trelawny struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. If I Survive You unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness.

Leigh Newman’s debut short story collection Nobody Gets Out Alive was published by Scribner in April 2022 and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, One Story, Tin House, Electric Literature, American Short Fiction, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Her memoir about growing up in Alaska, Still Points North (Dial, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2020 she was awarded a Pushcart fiction prize and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ fiction prize, as well as The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura.” When not writing, she takes care of her two kids, two dogs, two chickens, and beloved, disgruntled cat.

Mark Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, monographs on Luis Buñuel and Bob Dylan, and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He has translated more than 50 books, including works by Arthur Rimbaud, Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, and Marguerite Duras. Polizzotti is the translator of Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo (Archipelago). Her family was displaced in 1960 and eventually settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi. In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins in Kibogo a marvelous recount of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries who were determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. To some, Kibogo’s tale is a founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, and a bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witch doctor’s hoax. But deep down, they all secretly wonder – can Kibogo really summon the rain?

Marytza K. Rubio has an MFA in creative writing/Latin America and was a Bread Loaf scholar. She is the founder of Makara Center for the Arts, a nonprofit library in her hometown of Santa Ana, California. Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, the short story collection Maria, Maria: & Other Stories (Liveright) takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in “Brujería for Beginners” reminds us: “There’s always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won’t always know what it is until payment is due.” This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow in “Tijuca,” who promises to bury her husband’s head in the rich dirt of the jungle, and the sisters in “Moksha,” who are tempted by a sleek obsidian dagger once held by a vampiric idol. But magic isn’t limited to women. Animals are powerful magicians, too. There are stories starring subversive pigeons and hungry jaguars, resurrected saber-toothed tigers, and paranoid Peacocks. Maria, Maria: & Other Stories bristles with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition.

Megan McDowell has translated books written by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors; her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses (Riverhead Books) – another of the works translated by McDowell – is a collection of stories about seven strange houses. A person is missing, or a truth, or a memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die. In each story, twists and turns unnerve and surprise.

Meghan O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review and the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Sun in Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. In The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books), O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” maladies that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID. Together they represent a silent epidemic of chronic illnesses that afflict tens of millions of Americans. These are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions that resist easy description or simple cures. In The Invisible Kingdom, she synthesizes the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease – and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

Natalie Hodges has performed as a classical violinist throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She is a graduate of Harvard University, where she studied English and music. Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (Bellevue Literary Press) is her first book. How does time shape consciousness, and how does consciousness shape time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time? Uncommon Measure explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until performance anxiety forced her to give up the dream of becoming a concert solo violinist. Anchoring her story in illuminating research in neuroscience and quantum physics, Hodges traces her own passage through complex family dynamics, prejudice, and enormous personal expectations to come to terms with the meaning of a life reimagined – one still shaped by classical music but moving toward the freedom of improvisation.

Robert Samuels is a national political enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the intersection of politics, policy, and people. He joined the Post in 2011 after spending nearly five years working at the Miami Herald. In His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking), Samuels and co-author Toluse Olorunnipa examine the tragically familiar events of May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was added to the list of Black Americans killed by police when he was murdered outside a Minneapolis convenience store by a white officer. The video recording of his death awakened millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend striving for a better life. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Olorunnipa and Samuels examine Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the over-policing of his community, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. His Name Is George Floyd places its subject’s narrative within the context of the country’s legacy of institutional racism.

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of various fellowships and awards. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton & Company), his expansive second volume, Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity – climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy, and loss. The poems roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with – and sometimes contradicting – Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to address itself “only to freedom.”

Ruth Dickey is the executive director of the National Book Foundation. She has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. Since 2013 she has also served as executive director of Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL), which brings the best writers and thinkers to Seattle stages and classrooms.

Sarah Booker is an educator and literary translator working from Spanish to English. She has translated novels by Gabriela Ponce and Cristina Rivera Garza, and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her work has also been published in journals such as The Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:AM Magazine, Nashville Review, and Translation Review. In Jawbone, six girls at a private Catholic high school in Ecuador turn to the occult in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of their leader’s invention. This ominous novel explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at 17. Her work has been published in Best American Short Stories, and she is a recipient of fellowships from the Asian American Writers' Workshop and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2020, she founded the mutual aid group Bed-Stuy Strong. All This Could Be Different: A Novel (Viking) is her fiction debut. In it, we meet Sneah, a young immigrant who has moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, while grueling, seems to unlock every door. She can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women – soon developing a crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets are revealed, jobs go off the rails, evictions loom. As Sneah throws herself headlong into her new romance, Tig draws a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all. All This Could Be Different is one immigrant's journey – and a story of queer love and building community amidst struggle.

Shahriar Mandanipour is an exiled Iranian author and journalist who served in the Iran-Iraq war. His fiction includes two novels – Moon Brow and Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in English – and the story collection Seasons of Purgatory (Bellevue Literary Press). In 2006, Mandanipour moved to the United States, where in 2021, he became a citizen. In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from various perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

Shelley Wong is a poet whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. Her debut collection, As She Appears: Poems (YesYes Books), won the 2019 Pamet River Prize. It foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship marked by silence, a woman embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environments. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances, late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California and perfumed fashion runways to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive – exactly as they are.

Sherri Winston is the author of President of the Whole Fifth Grade, President of the Whole Sixth Grade, President of the Whole Sixth Grade: Girl Code, The Sweetest Sound, Jada Sly: Artist & Spy, and The Kayla Chronicles. Before she was an author, Winston was a newspaper writer and columnist. In Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution (Bloomsbury Children’s Books), Lotus just wants to express herself – with her violin, her retro style, and her fabulous hair. This school year, she’s taking her talent and spirit to the seventh grade at a new school of the arts. But her best friend, Rebel, thinks Lotus should stay put – Why should the fancy new school get all the funding and take the brightest kids? Rebel wants Lotus to help her protest, but Lotus isn’t sure. But later on, when Lotus finds herself in trouble for a dress code violation, she must choose between staying quiet and risking her beloved hair or fighting back. Inspired by real stories of Black girls fighting dress codes that discriminate against their hair and culture, Lotus Bloom introduces a memorable character who speaks up for what’s right, no matter what it takes.

Sherry Shenoda is the author of The Lightkeeper: A Novel. A Coptic poet, writer, and pediatrician, she was born in Cairo, and works at the intersection of human rights and child health. She serves as a pediatrician in a nonprofit health center. Shenoda’s collection Mummy Eaters (‎University of Nebraska Press) follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the 18th dynasty, Egypt. Much of Mummy Eaters is written as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the imagined ancestor and the author as the descendant. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife. This exploration suggests the implications of colonialism in her passage. The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward resurrection through the preservation of the human body in mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body as sacred matter, and a pathway to eternal life with the 16th- and 17th-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine, and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today, Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums.

Sonora Reyes is a queer second-generation immigrant who attended a Catholic high school. They write fiction full of queer and Latinx characters in various genres, and are the creator and host of #QPOCChat, a monthly community-building Twitter chat for queer writers of color. In The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School (Balzer + Bray), 16-year-old Yamilet Flores prefers to be known for her killer eyeliner, not for being one of the only Mexican kids at her new, mostly white, very rich Catholic school. But at least here, no one knows she’s gay, and Yami intends to keep it that way. After being outed by her crush and ex-best friend before transferring to Slayton Catholic, Yami has new priorities: keep her brother out of trouble, make her mom proud, and, most importantly, don’t fall in love. Granted, she’s never been great at any of those things, but that’s a problem for Future Yami. The thing is, it’s hard to fake being straight when Bo, the only openly queer girl at school, is so annoyingly perfect. And smart. And talented. And cute. So cute. Either way, Yami isn’t going to make the same mistake again. If word got back to her mom, she could face a lot worse than rejection. So she’ll have to start asking, WWASGD: What would a straight girl do? By turns hilarious, vulnerable, and searingly honest, The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School explores the joys and heartaches of living your whole truth out loud.

Tess Gunty’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (Knopf) is her fiction debut. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands. They, like her, have now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them. They are all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

Toluse Olorunnipa is the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post, which he joined in 2019 and where has covered three presidencies. He previously worked at Bloomberg reporting on politics and policy from Washington and Florida. In His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking), Olorunnipa and co-author Robert Samuels examine the tragically familiar events of May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was added to the list of Black Americans killed by police when he was murdered outside a Minneapolis convenience store by a white officer. The video recording of his death awakened millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend striving for a better life. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Olorunnipa and Samuels examine Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the over-policing of his community, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. His Name Is George Floyd places its subject’s narrative within the context of the country’s legacy of institutional racism.

Traci Chee is the New York Times bestselling author of The Reader trilogy and her YA novel in stories We Are Not Free, a National Book Award finalist which also earned the Printz Honor and the Walter Honor. A Thousand Steps Into Night (Clarion Books) is set in the realm of Awara, a place where gods, monsters, and humans coexist side by side. Miuko is an ordinary girl resigned to a safe, if uneventful, existence as an innkeeper’s daughter. Until she is cursed and begins to transform into a demon with a deadly touch, and embarks on a quest to reverse the curse and return to her everyday life. Aided by a thieving magpie spirit and continuously thwarted by a demon prince, Miuko must outfox tricksters, escape demon hunters, and negotiate with feral gods if she wants to make it home again. Yet with her transformation comes power and a freedom she never dreamed of, pushing her to weigh whether saving her soul is worth returning to an ordinary life that no longer fits her – and perhaps never did.