National Book Foundation Presents: The 2022 National Book Awards

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ramona Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She started in forensic videography before embarking upon a career as a photographer, writer, and editor. She is an Emmy nominee, a Sundance Native Lab fellow, a Time-Warner Storyteller fellow, a Tribeca All-Access grantee, and a WGBH producer fellow. Shutter (Soho Crime) is her first novel. Set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation, Shutter follows Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her skills have cracked many cases, and she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her psychologically harrowing ability has isolated her from friends, gotten her in trouble with the law, and pushed her away from the Navajo reservation where she was raised. Now, as the angry ghost of the victim of an apparent suicide insists she was murdered, it might also get her killed.

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.

Alejandro Varela’s work has appeared in The Point, Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Blunderbuss Magazine, the Southampton Review, The New Republic, and the anthology Pariahs. The Town of Babylon: A Novel (Astra House) is an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity. Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his 20-year high school reunion and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends. Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds. The Town of Babylon is a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community and young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.