Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. The Awards currently honor the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, published each year.
Below are the four African American Authors who have been nominated for the 2022 National Book Awards in the categories of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
Finalists for Nonfiction Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa for their book His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Robert Samuels is a national political enterprise reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on the intersection of politics, policy, and people. He previously wrote stories about life in the District for the Post’s social issues team.More about this author >
Toluse Olorunnipa is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 2019 and has covered three presidencies. He previously worked at Bloomberg, where he reported on politics and policy from Washington and Florida.
Check out their book His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice on Amazon.
Finalists for Fiction Gayl Jones for her book The Birdcatcher.
Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan.More about this author >
Finalist for Poetry Roger Reeves.
Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and Best Barbarian. A 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, Reeves is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors.More about this author >
