National Book Foundation

[National Book Foundation]

See you at #AWP17!

The National Book Foundation is headed to Washington, D.C. for #AWP17 . Here are some of the National Book Award Winners, Finalists, Longlist and 5 Under 35 honorees who you can catch during the conference. We’ll see you there! 

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award Winner and Finalist

Mystery in the Writing Process: Discovery, Revelation, and Witholding for Writers and Their Readers

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring National Book Award Winner William Alexander and National Book Award Longlist author Kekla Magoon

A Lecture by Jacqueline Woodson, sponsored by The Poetry Foundation

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Winner & four time National Book Award Finalist Jacqueline Woodson

VIDA Voices & Views: Exclusive Interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ada Limón, & Alicia Ostriker

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ada Limón

The Art of the Novella: Publishers and Writers On Crafting the Beautifully In-Between

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Josh Weill

Asian-American Generations at Coffee House Press

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Karen Yamashita

Some of My Best Friends Are Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin: Genre Bias in the Creative Writing

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Asali Solomon

But Do You Have a Novel? How and Why Short Story Writers Transition into Novelists

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Kirstin Valdez Quade 

Copyright Basics for the Digital Age

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm

Featuring two-time National Book Award Finalist James Gleick

Going for Gold: Five Novelists Rewrite the Sports Narrative

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tracy O'Neill

An Invitation to Poetic Discovery, Sponsored by Poets House

4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist & Longlist author Monica Youn

Friday, February 10, 2017

Viet Thanh Nguyen, National Book Award Finalist

Celebrating The Golden Shovel Anthology in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring three time National Book Award Finalist Marilyn Nelson 

Strange Bedfellows: The Unholy Mingling of Politics and Art

9:00AM-10:15AM

Featuring National Book Award Longlist author Anthony Marra

Workshopping War: The Challenges of War Writing in the Classroom

10:30am - 11:45am 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jayne Anne Phillips

Crafty: Four City University of New York MFA Graduates Read from Their Work

10:30am - 11:45am 

 Featuring National Book Award Winner and 5 Under 35 Honoree Phil Klay

Beyond Sex: The Poetics of Desire

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tim Seibles

Coming of Age: The Blurry Lines between Adult & YA literature

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jason Reynolds

Raising Hell: Writing from the Extremes

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM 

 Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tea Obreht

American Smooth: A Tribute to Rita Dove

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Winner Robin Coste Lewis and National Book Award Finalist Rita Dove 

The Interconnectedness of Poetry & Memoir

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

 Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tracy K. Smith

A Reading and Conversation with Alexander Chee and Valeria Luiselli, Sponsored by Coffee House Press and Kundiman

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Valeria Luiselli and National Book Foundation Executive Director, Lisa Lucas

Going There: Writing the Complicated Truth in the World’s Hot Spots

1:30pm - 2:45pm 

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Brit Bennett 

A Tribute to Marie Ponsot

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and Longlist author Kevin Young

Daddy’s Little Girl, and Other Misfortunes in YA

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Laura Ruby

To Sing the Idea of All: Walt Whitman in DC

3:00 pm - 4:15 pm 

Featuring Literarian Award Winner and Cave Canem co-founder Cornelius Eady

A Conversation between Chimamanda Ngozi and Ta-Nehisi Coates

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner Ta-Nehisi Coates

Distant Lands, Intimate Voices

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Viet Thanh Nguyen

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Rita Dove, National Book Award Finalist

Poetry As Invocation

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ada Limón

Get in Formation: Form in YA Literature

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring three time National Book Award Finalist Marilyn Nelson

Being the Change You Want to See: The New Literary Leadership

10:30am - 11:45am

Featuring National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas

Immigrants / Children of Immigrants

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and Longlist author Monica Youn

21st Century Troubadours

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Rita Dove

Women Writers Get Gritty

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Jayne Anne Phillips

No Easy Readers: The Challenges of Writing for Children

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner William Alexander and National Book Award Longlist author Anne Ursu

The Ghosts of History

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist and 5 Under 35 Honoree Angela Flournoy

A Reading and Conversation with Aracelis Girmay, Tim Seibles, and Danez Smith.

1:30pm - 2:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Tim Seibles

Socially Conscious Fiction

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring National Book Award Longlist author Garth Greenwell

Going for Broke: Working Class Writers on Choosing a Career In The Arts

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring 5 Under 35 Honoree Tiphanie Yanique 

Writing Across Cultures

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring 5 under 35 Honoree Valeria Luiselli 

Conversation with Ross Gay & Tina Chang

3:00pm - 4:15pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Ross Gay

Poetry in the Age of the Drone

4:30pm - 5:45pm

Featuring National Book Award Finalist Solmaz Sharif

Reading with Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes & Ocean Vuong

8:30pm - 10:00pm

Featuring National Book Award Winner Rita Dove, and National Book Award Winner & Finalist Terrance Hayes

Reading with Colum McCann & Margot Livesly

8:30pm - 10:00pm 

 Featuring National Book Award Winner Colum McCann

[National Book Foundation]

Hear Ross Gay read the poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” from his 2015 National Book Award Finalist book. 

[National Book Foundation]

IN HONOR OF MLK DAY, 3 SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF SOCIAL ACTIVISTS

CLAUDETTE COLVIN: TWICE TOWARD JUSTICE by Phillip Hoose

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Colvin, shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a child.

AT CANAAN’S EDGE: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS, 1965-68  by Taylor Branch               

The last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. Read NY Times Book Review.

LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN by John D’Emilio                    

Published on the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin is the first detailed examination of the man responsible for that seminal event. Bayard Rustin exhibited charismatic leadership and courage in the early days of the civil rights movement, inspired tens of thousands, and mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., in the principles of nonviolent protest. Yet his name is not accorded the same honor as others in part because, author John D'Emilio argues, he was the victim of American attitudes toward homosexuality during his lifetime.

[National Book Foundation]

#NBAward Finalist All the Light We Cannot See is now #1 on New York Times’ list of best-selling fiction. Congratulations Anthony Doerr and @ScribnerBooks!! #books #reading #literature

[National Book Foundation]

RG @lastnightsreading: Emily St. John Mandel at #MashReads Book Club, 1/8/15 #Station11 #NBAward Finalist @aaknopf

[National Book Foundation]

RG @lastnightsreading: Claudia Rankine at the Poetry Project, 12/17/14 #NBAward Finalist for Citizen: An American Lyric @graywolfpress

[National Book Foundation]

One of the many riveting photographs collected for @deborahwiles1 ’s documentary novel Revolution, part two of the author’s Sixties Trilogy and a Finalist for the 2014 #NBAward for Young People’s Lit. Follow @deborahwiles1 on #Instagram and #Pinterest to see the treasure trove of images, music, and video she uses to bring the dramatic events of Freedom Summer 1964 vividly to life! @scholasticinc #teenreads #YA #history #CivilRightsMovement #Mississippi #FreedomSummer #VotingRights #fiction #novels #bookstagram #mustread #readdeep

[National Book Foundation]

#TBT 0ur scrapbook of press clippings of the 1985 National Book Awards Ceremony. 

[National Book Foundation]

FIRST PAGE, FIRST LINE of Richard Powers’ ORFEO, LONGLISTED for the 2014 #NBAward for Fiction. @wwnorton #lit #fiction #novels #books #bookstagram #reading #mustreads #readdeep

[National Book Foundation]

Our summer literary travels with #NBAward-honored books continue with a visit to Italy, the locale for 1961 #NBAward Finalist A Light in the Piazza. Elizabeth Spencer’s novella of a mother and daughter’s fateful journey to Florence was later adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical.

Via The Great Escape, 12 far-flung novels from #NBAward honored authors.

[National Book Foundation]

Jump start your #summer reading program with a classic NBA honored novel from our #summer #reading list: The Great Escape. 12 books set in far-flung locales starting with HAWAII– the locale of the 1952 #NBAward Winner From Here to Eternity. “This book is full of violence, drunkenness, suicide, gambling, whoring, existential crises, self-loathing, ugliness, and degradation in Hawai’i in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor,” says NBF executive director Harold Augenbraum.

More great #NBAward #Summer #reading suggestions here.

[National Book Foundation]

Our last #poetrygram for #NationalPoetryMonth is dedicated to the late beloved #poet Lucille Clifton, who won the #NBAward in 2000 for her collection of #poems Blessing the Boats. Clifton’s poems drew from her personal experiences as an African-American woman who came of age in the era of Jim Crow segregation. On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for #Poetry, poet and BookUpNYC instructor John Murillo praises Clifton’s “terse, clipped lines” meant to– in Clifton’s words– “comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.” Murillo writes: “She knew a thing or two about life and mortality, about this world and its cruelties, and she wrote from the heart of it. Here is a wisdom without pretense, a voice we can trust because we know she won’t lie about what she’s seen.”

[National Book Foundation]

“I found myself turning over notions that have always been at the fore for romantic poets: the nature of beauty, the nature of the soul, how love exists in time,” says poet and memoirist Mark Doty of his 2008 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Fire to Fire. On our blog dedicated to Winners of the #NBAward for #Poetry, poet KiKi Petrosino praises the collection’s “attentive, compelling lyric presence.” Doty’s verse, says Petrosino, “is awash in images that appeal to every bodily sense, and the accumulation of these images takes us on a rhapsodic journey.”

[National Book Foundation]

A handful of poets have been twice-honored with #NBAwards for Poetry, but Alan Dugan is the only poet to be honored for both his first and last collections of #poetry. His first collection, simply titled Poems, won the #NBAward for Poetry in 1962, as well as many other honors. His last collection, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, published at age 78, won the #NBAward in 2001. Writing for our blog dedicated to the Winners of the #NBAward for Poetry, poet and critic Katie Peterson says Dugan’s poem are often described as “tough talking” and “urban.” But if Dugan’s poems are hard on others as well as himself ( “an aging phony, stale, woozy, and corrupt /from unattempted dreams and bad health habits.”), the pain is worth the pleasure. Dugan, says Peterson,“writes love poems where intimacy has all the brutality and wordlessness of animal instinct…His lines are tense and govern expectation by making you so pleasurably anxious you feel compelled to continue to read.”

[National Book Foundation]

Mary Oliver won the 1992 #NBAward for #Poetry for New and Selected Poems, a collection that remains one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country today. On our blog dedicated to the Winners of the National Book Award for Poetry poet Kiki Petrosino writes that Oliver’s introspections concerning the natural world allow us “to understand nature as a passageway to a place enchanted by inquiry.” It is Oliver’s gift for the ecstatic, the intimate, and the revelatory that make Oliver’s solitary soliloquies universally loved. As when Oliver writes: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”