Cleveland’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards this year feature a variety of published works, but they all have one thing in common: a central theme of diversity and addressing racism.
This year's group of winners include Geraldine Brooks, Lan Samantha Chang, Matthew F. Delmont and Saeed Jones, all honored for works published last year. Charlayne Hunter-Gault earns the lifetime achievement award.
“This year, we honor a profound and funny novel centered in a Chinese restaurant, a brilliant story of 19th-century horseracing with contemporary echoes, a stunning poetry collection that captures who we are now, and a meticulous history that recasts our understanding of World War II,” says Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a press release. “All are capped by the lifetime achievement of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who remade this country with her courage and her nuanced reporting.”
Hunter-Gault is known for her journalism career, working for the New Yorker, the New York Times, CNN, NPR, PBS and NBC. She’s written numerous books, including her 2022 collection My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives.
Brooks wins an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in the fiction category, for her ninth book Horse, published last year. The book examines a racehorse and its relationship to its Black groom, looking through storylines at various points in time.
Also winning an award in fiction is Lan Samantha Chang, for the book The Family Chao. The novel subverts Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, instead following characters in a Chinese-American family living in Wisconsin.
In the nonfiction category, Matthew F. Delmont wins for his book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, which shares heroic efforts of Black men and women in World War II, and their challenges upon returning home to segregation.
Columbus, Ohio-based Saeed Jones wins in the poetry category for his second collection, Alive at the End of the World: a form-bending group of 46 poems.
The awards have been going strong since 1935 and are currently managed by the Cleveland Foundation. They’re named after Cleveland philanthropist and poet Edith Anisfield Wolf.
“[Anisfield Wolf’s] notion that literature can ignite justice is valid nearly 90 years later, and we are honored to add the 2023 winners to the canon,” says Karen R. Long, the manager of the book awards at the Cleveland Foundation, in a press release. “We are proud the newest books tackle the toughest topics and insist on ways forward.”
On Sept. 28, the 2023 winners will be honored at the Maltz Performing Arts Center — an event that will coincide with Cleveland Book Week, according to a press release. Find more information about the awards and this year’s award-winners at Anisfield-Wolf.org.
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