Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Announces 2026 Winners A Landmark Year of Debut Voices

NEW YORK, NY – April 15, 2026 – In a milestone year for the prize, four groundbreaking works by debut authors have been named winners of the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), the nation’s only endowed juried prize dedicated to literature that contributes to our understanding of race and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.

Selected by a distinguished jury chaired by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey, this year’s winners reflect both the emergence of bold new literary voices and the prize’s growing national prominence—underscored by a recent historic increase in award money that places AWBA among the country’s most significant literary honors.

The 2026 winners are: 

●      Fiction: Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore

●      Nonfiction: Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of an American City by Bench Ansfield

●      Memoir: The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza

●      Poetry: Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina

Pioneering historian Nell Irvin Painter has also received the Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring her transformative role in reshaping how we understand history, race, and identity in America. Known for her groundbreaking work on race and the American experience, particularly The History of White People, which reframes “whiteness” as a constructed and evolving category rather than a fixed identity.

For the first time in prize history, the winners were announced today in New York City at a private luncheon bringing together the honorees, jurors, and literary stakeholders—marking a new chapter in the award’s national reach and visibility.

“It is never easy to choose a single work in each genre from so many excellent books published each year,” said jury chair Natasha Trethewey. “That each of this year’s winners is a debut makes the honor all the more profound—new voices, already essential.  These books matter because they deepen our understanding, enlarge our empathy, and remind us of literature’s power to illuminate who we are.”

Founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards remain the only national endowed juried prize recognizing books that contribute to our understanding of race and foster an appreciation of cultural diversity. Its legacy includes writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Isabel Wilkerson, and Colson Whitehead—writers whose work has shaped discourse on race and identity.

“The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were born of Edith’s conviction that literature can confront prejudice and deepen our shared humanity,” said Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation. “To announce these prizes in New York City today is to extend that legacy on a national stage—ensuring these vital voices are heard. More than 90 years later, the prize feels more urgent than ever—amplifying work that not only reveals the world as it is, but compels us to imagine what it might become.”

This year’s winners were selected by a jury of leading writers and scholars: AWBA-winning novelist Peter Ho Davies; bestselling AWBA-winning writer and scholar Charles King; AWBA-winning writer and American historian Tiya Miles; and critically acclaimed author Luis Alberto Urrea, alongside Chair Trethewey. Together, they continue the prize’s enduring commitment to literary excellence, intellectual rigor, and cultural impact.

About the 2026 Winners:

Lifetime Achievement: Nell Irvin Painter  

Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of books including: The New York Times bestseller The History of White People, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol and the National Book Critics Circle finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, Painter has received honorary degrees from Yale University, Wesleyan University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dartmouth. After a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her most recent essay collection, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays (Doubleday 2024) was a 2024 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Painter lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey.

Fiction: Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House)

Carrie R. Moore is a Georgia native, currently living in Texas. She earned her MFA in Fiction at The Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Oprah Daily, The Sewanee Review, One Story, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Moore’s debut short story collection, Make Your Way Home, explores Black love and longing in the American South. Anisfield-Wolf juror and acclaimed novelist Peter Ho Davies writes, “This is the debut of a preternaturally mature artist, the stories so richly realized, their characters so deeply known that they feel novelistic in their depth and resonance.” 

Poetry: Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina (University of Nebraska Press)

Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. Adesina’s debut collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea, was the Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Anisfield-Wolf Jury Chair, Natasha Trethewey, notes “At the heart of Gbenga Adesina’s haunting, elegiac collection is the stunning titular poem, ‘Death Does Not End at the Sea,’ a meditation on the difficult journeys—both spiritual and physical—undertaken by migrants, people fleeing troubled lands, with the hope of new lives.” 

Nonfiction: Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield (W.W. Norton & Company)

Bench Ansfield is a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University, and they hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Born in Flames was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 by the New York Times and one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. Anisfield-Wolf juror and historian Tiya Miles notes, “Born in Flames is an exceptional work of urban history that awakens readers to an entire phenomenon of complex racial, financial, and governmental entanglements long overlooked in scholarly and popular accounts.”

Memoir: The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza (Catapult)

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist. Her award-winning writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among others. The recipient of support from Fulbright, MacDowell, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Aziza has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, Palestine, and the United States. Anisfield-Wolf juror and historian Charles King writes, “Throughout The Hollow Half, Aziza weaves personal narrative with history and laces both with the revelatory beauty of the Arabic language. Words bear their own secrets, of lost lives and shadow ideas, of home, horrors, and healing.”

New Award Updates:

This year’s winners will journey to Cleveland for a two-day festival-style celebration, including the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony which will take place on September 18 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have announced the addition of another distinguished author to its jury: Jericho Brown. Brown is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and currently serves as Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.  He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2015 for his second poetry collection, The New Testament. Winner of the Whiting Award and the American Book Award, Brown’s numerous accolades also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards submission process for this year is now open. For books published and copyrighted in 2026, the submission period will end on October 16, 2026.  For more information on the submission guidelines, please visit https://www.anisfield-wolf.org/submissions/.

About the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of race and human diversity. Established in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, the awards are the only national endowed juried prize for literature that explores race and celebrates diversity. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are administered by the Cleveland Foundation. For more information follow us on Facebook, X, Threads, and Instagram.

About the Cleveland Foundation

Established in 1914, the Cleveland Foundation is the world’s first community foundation – and one of the largest today. Through the generosity of donors, the foundation improves the lives of residents of Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties by building community endowment, addressing needs through grantmaking and providing leadership on vital issues. Our vision is a vibrant Northeast Ohio where no Clevelander is left behind. For more information, visit ClevelandFoundation.org and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.