Winners of the 46th Annual American Book Award

September 15, 2025 The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Forty-Sixth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS Ceremonies, Sunday, October 26, 2025, 2:00 p.m. Oakland, CA—The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Forty-Sixth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2025 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 26, 2025, at 2:00 p.m., at the Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, Room 315, on the UC Berkeley Campus, Berkeley, CA. This event is open to the public. The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity; the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers. (continued)
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The 2025 American Book Award Winners Kaveh Akbar Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf) Amy M. Alvarez Makeshift Altar: Poems (The University Press of Kentucky) Marie-Helene Bertino Beautyland: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Percival Everett James: A Novel (Doubleday) Marcela Fuentes Malas: A Novel (Penguin Books) Fady Joudah […] Poems (Milkweed Editions) Stacey Levine Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press) Sarah Lewis The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press) Tomiko and Ryokuyo Matsumoto, and Nancy Matsumoto, Editor By the Shore of Lake Michigan (UCLA Asian American Studies Center) Sharon McMahon The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the
Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement (Thesis) Claire Messud This Strange Eventful History: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company) Maceo Montoya and Javier O. Huerta Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century 
Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press) m.s. RedCherries mother (Penguin Books) Danzy Senna Colored Television: A Novel (Riverhead Books) A.B. Spellman, and Lauri Scheyer, Editor Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) Lifetime Achievement Award John Edgar Wideman Editor/Publisher Award Erroll McDonald, Vice President/Executive Editor, Penguin Random House Anti-Censorship Award Joy Reid
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Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award Kevin Killian, Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext(e))
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