The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

For more information about the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, click here.

2017     The fortunes by Peter Ho Davies
2017     Olio by Tyehimba Jess
2017     The association of small bombs by Karan Mahajan
2017     Hidden figures : the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race by Margot Lee Shetterly
2017     Isabel Allende Lifetime Achievement Award
2016     The gay revolution : the story of the struggle by Lillian Faderman
2016     The jazz palace : a novel by Mary Morris
2016     Heaven by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
2016     What the eye hears : a history of tap dancing by Brian Seibert
2015     The new testament by Jericho Brown
2015     Hard love province : poems by Marilyn Chin
2015     David Brion Davis Lifetime Achievement Award
2015     A tale of two plantations : slave life and labor in Jamaica and Virginia by Richard S. Dunn
2015     A brief history of seven killings by Marlon James
2014     Wilson Harris Lifetime Achievement Award
2014     George Laming Lifetime Achievement Award
2014     A constellation of vital phenomena : a novel by Anthony Marra
2014     The big smoke by Adrian Matejka
2014     My promised land : the triumph and tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit
2013     My favorite warlord by Eugene Gloria
2013     Kind one : a novel by Laird Hunt
2013     The yellow birds : a novel by Kevin Powers
2013     Far from the tree : parents, children and the search for identity by Andrew Solomon
2013     Wole Soyinka Lifetime Achievement Award
2012     American oracle : the Civil War in the civil rights era by David Blight
2012     Half-blood blues : a novel by Esi Edugyan
2012     Arnold Rampersad Lifetime Achievement Award
2012     Less than human : why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others by David Livingstone Smith
2011     Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade by David Eltis and David Richardson
2011     Great house by Nicole Krauss
2011     The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia by Mary Helen Stefaniak
2011     John Edgar Wideman Lifetime Achievement Award
2011     The warmth of other suns : the epic story of America's great migration by Isabel Wilkerson
2010     Elizabeth Alexander Lifetime Achievement Award
2010     Burnt shadows by Kamila Shamsie
2010     William Julius Wilson Lifetime Achievement Award
2010     Oprah Winfrey Lifetime Achievement Award
2009     The plague of doves by Louise Erdrich
2009     The Hemingses of Monticello : an American family by Annette Gordon-Reed
2009     The boat by Nam Le
2009     Paule Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award
2008     Nonfiction: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Fiction: The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz; Fiction: The reluctant fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid; Lifetime Achievement Award: William Melvin Kelley
2007     Fiction: Half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Fiction: Blue front by Martha Collins; Nonfiction: Steel drivin' man : John Henry, the untold story of an American legend by Scott Reynolds Nelson; Lifetime Achievement Award: Taylor Branch 
2006     Nonfiction: New York burning : liberty, slavery, and conspiracy in eighteenth-century Manhattan by Jill Lepore; Fiction: On beauty : a novel by Zadie Smith; Lifetime Achievement Award: William Demby
2005     Fiction: The dew breaker by Edwidge Danticat; Nonfiction: M•A•C•N•O•L•I•A by A. Van Jordan; Nonfiction: Unforgivable blackness : the rise and fall of Jack Johnson by Geoffrey C. Ward; Lifetime Achievement Award: August Wilson
2004     Nonfiction: Generations of captivity : a history of African-American slaves by Ira Berlin; Fiction: The known world by Edward P. Jones; Nonfiction: Random family : love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc; Lifetime Achievement Award: Derek Walcott
2003     Fiction: The emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter; Nonfiction: A problem from hell : America and the age of genocide by Samantha Power; Fiction: World hotel by Reetika Vazirani; Lifetime Achievement Award: Adrienne Kennedy
2002     Nonfiction: Q : the autobiography of Quincy Jones by Quincy Jones; Nonfiction: Vernon can read! : a memoir by Vernon E. Jordan Jr.; Fiction: John Henry Days : a novel by Colson Whitehead; Lifetime Achievement Award: Jay Wright
2001     Nonfiction: W.E.B. Du Bois : the fight for equality and the American century, 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis; Nonfiction: Rope burns : stories from the corner by F.X. Toole; Lifetime Achievement Award: Lucille Clifton
2000     Fiction: A gesture life by Chang-rae Lee; Nonfiction: Out of place : a memoir by Edward W. Said; Lifetime Achievement Award: Ernest J. Gaines 
1999     Fiction: Cloudsplitter : a novel by Russell Banks; Nonfiction: Walking with the wind : a memoir of the movement by John Lewis; Lifetime Achievement Award: John Hope Franklin 
1998     Nonfiction: The black notebooks : an interior journey by Toi Derricotte; Fiction: Always outnumbered, always outgunned by Walter Mosley;  Lifetime Achievement Award: Gordon Parks
1997     Fiction: The autobiography of my mother by Jamaica Kincaid; Nonfiction: The color of water : a Black man's tribute to his white mother by James McBride;  Lifetime Achievement Award: Albert L. Murray
1996     Fiction: All souls' rising by Madison Smartt Bell; Nonfiction: Amazing grace : the lives of children and the conscience of a nation by Jonathan Kozol;  Lifetime Achievement Award: Dorothy West
1995     Fiction: Sweetbitter : a novel by Reginald Gibbons; Nonfiction: Parallel time : growing up in black and white by Brent Staples; Nonfiction: The science and politics of racial research by William H. Tucker
1994     Fiction: The Latin deli : prose and by Judith Ortiz Cofer;  Nonfiction: W.E.B. Du Bois--biography of a race, 1868-1919 by David Levering Lewis; Nonfiction: A different mirror : a history of multicultural America by Ronald Takaki (rev. ed. (2008) here)
1993     Nonfiction: In my father's house : Africa in the philosophy of culture by Kwame Anthony Appiah; Fiction: Woman hollering creek and other stories by Sandra Cisneros; Nonfiction: The civilization of the goddess : the world of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas
1992     Landmark achievement: Invisible man (1952) by Ralph Ellison Landmark; Nonfiction: Praying for sheetrock : a work of by Melissa Faye Greene; Nonfiction: Lessons and legacies : the meaning of the Holocaust in a changing world, edited by Peter Hayes; Nonfiction: The IQ mythology : class, race, gender, and inequality by Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh; Fiction: The homeplace : poems by Marilyn Nelson
1991     Nonfiction: African ark : the peoples and ancient cultures of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher; Nonfiction: Gunnar Myrdal and America's conscience : social engineering and racial liberalism, 1938-1987 by Walter A. Jackson; Nonfiction: The arrogance of faith : Christianity and race in America from the colonial era to the twentieth century by Forrest G. Wood
1990     Nonfiction: The image of the Black in Western art : vol. 4, part 1, Slaves and liberators, and vol. 4, part 2, Black models and white myths by Hugh Honour; Fiction: The women of plums : poems in the voices of slave women by Dolores Kendrick
1989     Nonfiction: Parting the waters : America in the King years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch; Nonfiction: The Schomburg library of nineteenth-century Black women writers (30 volumes) by Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Nonfiction: A life in the struggle : Ivory Perry and the culture of opposition by George Lipsitz; Nonfiction: Dreamings : the art of aboriginal Australia by Peter Sutton
1988     Nonfiction: Living Maya text by Walter F. Morris, Jr. ; photographs by Jeffrey J. Foxx; Fiction: A sport of nature : a novel by Nadine Gordimer; Fiction: Beloved by Toni Morrison; Nonfiction: Whose votes count? : affirmative action and minority voting rights by Abigail M. Thernstrom
1987     Nonfiction: The life of Langston Hughes by Arnold Rampersad; Nonfiction: Spirit of survival by Gail Sheehy
1986     Nonfiction: Kachinas : a Hopi artist's documentary by Clifford Bahnimptewa and Barton Wright; Nonfiction: Nazis in Skokie : freedom, community and the First Amendment by Donald Alexander Downs; Nonfiction: Feedom rising : life under apartheid through the eyes of an American on a four-year clandestine journey through southern Africa by James North
1985     Nonfiction: Mouroir : mirrornotes of a novel by Breyten Breytenbach; Nonfiction: The abandonment of the Jews : America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 by David S. Wyman
1984     Nonfiction: Pre-Columbian art by Jose Alcina Franch; Nonfiction: From immigrants to ethnics : the Italian Americans by Humbert S. Nelli
1983     Nonfiction: Hunger of memory : the education of Richard Rodriguez : an autobiography by Richard Rodriguez; Nonfiction: Aké : the years of childhood by Wole Soyinka
1982     Nonfiction: Evangelist of race : the Germanic vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain by Geoffrey Field; Nonfiction: People of the sacred mountain : a history of the northern Cheyenne chiefs and warrior societies, 1830-1879 with an epilogue 1969-1974 by Peter John Powell
1981     Nonfiction: Maasai text by Tepilit Ole Saitoti ; photos by Carol Beckwith; Nonfiction: Song from the earth : American Indian painting by Jamake Highwater
1980     Nonfiction: The ecology of human development : experiments by nature and design by Urie Bronfenbrenner; Nonfiction: The !Kung San : men, women, and work in a foraging society by Richard Borshay Lee
1979     Nonfiction: The Bushmen : san hunters and herders of Southern Africa, edited by Phillip V. Tobias
1978     Nonfiction: The legacy of Malthus : the social costs of the new scientific racism by Allan Chase; Nonfiction: The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
1977     Nonfiction: Simple justice : the history of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's struggle for equality by Richard Kluger (Rev. and expanded ed. (2004) here); Nonfiction: Years of infamy : the untold story of America's concentration camps by Michi Weglyn (Updated ed. (1996) here)
1976     Nonfiction: The war against the Jews, 1933–1945 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz; Nonfiction: The Arabs : their history, aims, and challenge to the industrialized world by Thomas Kiernan; Nonfiction: The myth of the Jewish race by Raphael Patai and Jennifer P. Wing
1975     Nonfiction: Roll, Jordan, roll; the world the slaves made by Eugene D. Genovese; Nonfiction: The Aryan myth; a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe by Leon Poliakov
1974     Nonfiction: Doctor and the Aborigines by Charles Duguid; Nonfiction: The unfinished quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre; Nonfiction: Justice in South Africa by Albie Sachs; Nonfiction: The Dreyfus case: a documentary history by Louis Snyder
1973     Nonfiction: The water is wide by Pat Conroy; Nonfiction: Men and brothers; Anglo-American antislavery cooperation by Betty Fladeland; Nonfiction: Behind ghetto walls; Black families in a federal slum by Lee Rainwater
1972     Nonfiction: The Black image in the white mind; the debate on Afro-American character and destiny, 1817-1914 by George M. Fredrickson; Nonfiction: Outcasts from evolution; scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 by John S. Haller Jr.; Nonfiction: The healing of a nation by David Loye; Nonfiction: The autobiography of an unknown South African by Naboth Mokgatle; Nonfiction: Slavery in the structure of American politics, 1765-1820 by Donald L. Robinson
1971     Nonfiction: A history of the African people by Robert W. July; Nonfiction: Black freedom : the nonviolent abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War by Carleton Mabee; Nonfiction: La raza: the Mexican Americans by Stan Steiner; Nonfiction: The death and rebirth of the Seneca by Anthony F.C. Wallace
1970     Nonfiction: Scottsboro : a tragedy of the American South by Dan T. Carter (rev. ed. (2007) here); Nonfiction: Custer died for your sins : an Indian manifesto by Vine Deloria Jr.; Nonfiction: The Negro in Brazilian society by Florestan Fernandes; Nonfiction: The great betrayal; the evacuation of the Japanese-Americans during World War II by Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis
1969     Nonfiction: Negro and white children : a psychological study in the rural South by E. Earl Baughman and W. Grant Dahlstrom; Fiction: In the Mecca : poems by Gwendolyn Brooks; Nonfiction: The Leo Frank case by Leonard Dinnerstein; Nonfiction: The American Indian today by Stuart Levine and Nancy O. Lurie
1968     Nonfiction: Warrant for genocide; the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion by Norman Cohn; Nonfiction: Children of crisis; a study of courage and fear by Robert Coles; Nonfiction: The destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg (Rev. ed. (1985) here) (3d ed. (2003) here); Nonfiction: The Jews among the nations by Erich Kahler
1967     Nonfiction: The problem of slavery in Western culture by David Brion Davis; Nonfiction: La vida; a Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty--San Juan and New York by Oscar Lewis
1966     Nonfiction: The unity of mankind in Greek thought by H.C. Baldry; Nonfiction: Manchild in the promised land by Claude Brown; Nonfiction: The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley; Nonfiction: Your heredity and environment by Amram Scheinfeld
1965     Nonfiction: Assimilation in American life : the role of race, religion, and national origins by Milton M. Gordon; Nonfiction: The struggle for equality; abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction by James M. McPherson; Nonfiction: A history of the Jews by Abram L. Sachar (5th ed (1970) here); Nonfiction: Mississippi : the closed society by James W. Silver
1964     Nonfiction: Beyond the melting pot; the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City by Daniel P. Moynihan and Nathan Glazer (2nd ed (1970) here); Nonfiction: The new world of Negro Americans by Harold R. Isaacs; Nonfiction: Faith and prejudice : intergroup problems in Protestant curricula by Bernhard E. Olson
1963     Nonfiction: Mankind evolving : the evolution of the human species by Theodosius Dobzhansky
1962     Fiction: The forbidden man : a novel by Gina Allen; Nonfiction: Antislavery : the crusade for freedom in America by Dwight L. Dumond; Nonfiction: Black like me John Howard Griffin (another edition is here)
1961     Nonfiction: To Sir, with love by E.R. Braithwaite; Nonfiction: The reluctant African Louis E. Lomax
1960     Nonfiction: The lost cities of Africa by Basil Davidson; Nonfiction: I speak for myself by John Haynes Holmes
1959     Nonfiction: Stride toward freedom : the Montgomery story by Martin Luther King Jr.; Nonfiction: Racial and cultural minorities; an analysis of prejudice and discrimination by George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger
1958     Nonfiction: White mother by Jessie B. Sams; Nonfiction: Handbook on race relations by South African Institute of Race Relations
1957     Nonfiction: The masters and the slaves [Casa-Grande & Senzala] : a study in the development of Brazilian civilization by Gilberto Freyre (2nd ed. (1966) here); Nonfiction: Naught for your comfort by Trevor Huddleston
1956     Nonfiction: A manual of intergroup relations by John P. Dean and Alex Rosen; Nonfiction: They wait in darkness by George W. Shepherd Jr.
1955     Nonfiction: Report on Africa by Oden Meeker; Nonfiction: Cultural difference and medical care; the case of the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest by Lyle Saunders
1954     Nonfiction: Struggle for Africa by Vernon Bartlett; Fiction: Simple takes a wife by Langston Hughes
1953     Nonfiction: People of the Deer by Farley Mowat; Nonfiction: A many-splendored thing by Han Suyin
1952     Fiction: Race relations by Brewton Berry; Nonfiction: Venture to the interior by Laurens van der Post
1951     Nonfiction: Twilight in South Africa by Henry Gibbs; Fiction: The wall by John Hersey
1950     Nonfiction: Punishment without crime; what you can do about prejudice by S. Andhil Fineberg; Fiction: Your most humble servant by Shirley Graham
1949     Nonfiction: Anatomy of paradise: Hawaii and the islands of the South Seas by J.C. Furnas; Fiction: Cry, the beloved country by Alan Paton
1948     Nonfiction: The Indians of the Americas by John Collier; Fiction: The other room by Worth Tuttle Hedden
1947     Fiction: East River by Sholem Asch; Nonfiction: Latin Americans in Texas by Pauline R. Kibbe
1946     Nonfiction: Black metropolis : a study of Negro life in a northern city by Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake (Rev. ed. (1993) here); Nonfiction: One nation by Wallace Stegner, with the editors of Look
1945     Fiction: Earth and high heaven by Gwethalyn Graham; Nonfiction: An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy by Gunnar Myrdal (20th anniversary ed. (1962) here)
1944     'New world a-coming'; inside black America by Roi Ottley; The world of Sholom Aleichem by Maurice Samuel
1943     Dust tracks on a road by Zora Neale Hurston
1942     Quest : an autobiography by Leopold Infeld (2nd ed. (1980) here); The Haitian people by James G. Leyburn (2nd ed. (1966) here)
1941     From many lands by Louis Adamic
1940     The Negro family in the United States by E. Franklin Frazier
1939     No Award
1938     No Award
1937     We Europeans; a survey of 'racial' problems by A.C. Haddon and Julian Huxley
1936     Negro politicians; the rise of Negro politics in Chicago by Harold Gosnell