This year's National Book Award winners have been announced! The
National Book Award is given for excellence in American Literature in
the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's
Literature.
Here are this year's winners:
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Winner in Fiction - Fleeing his violent master at the side of
abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in
mid-nineteenth-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to
hide his identity throughout the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.
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Winner in Nonfiction - A riveting examination of a nation in crisis,
from one of the finest political journalists of our generation. Packer
journeys through the lives of several Americans including a son of a
tobacco farmer, a factory worker in the Rust Belt, a Washington insider,
a Silicon Valley billionaire, and others.
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Winner in Poetry - In "Incarnadine," Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out
places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a
diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of
dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several
poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give
an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open
herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a
wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all
tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are
matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a
lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning--for
love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak.
Beautiful and inventive, "Incarnadine" is the new collection by one of
America's most ambitious poets.
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Winner in Young People's Literature - Just when 12-year-old Summer
thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an
emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her
little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for
harvest workers.
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