American Book Awards 2023 winners announced.

The winners of the American Book Awards 2023 were announced on Tuesday, August 22, 2023. Here are the writers of African descent on the list.

The American Book Awards, from the Before Columbus Foundation, were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards, first hosted in 1980, 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.

In 2021, Maisy Card, Johanna Fernández, Randall Horton,Gerald Horne, Judy Juanita, William Melvin Kelley, Maryemma Graha, and Shana Redmond made the list. The winners for 2022 were Daphne A. Brooks, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Fatima Shaik, Phillip B. Williams, and Gayl Jones.

The winners for 2023 were made public with the following writers of African descent making the cut;

• Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds (Doubleday)
• Kelly Lytle Hernández, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Everett Hoagland, The Ways: Poems of Affirmation, Reflection and Wonder (North Star Nova Press)
• Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling (Knopf)
• Darryl Pinckney, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Shenoda, Mummy Eaters (University of Nebraska Press)

Anti Censorship Award

• Neta C. Crawford

Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism

• bell hooks

The American Book Award 2023 winners will be formally recognised at a ceremony on Sunday, October 1, 2023.