ANNOUNCEMENT: 74th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Winners

I'm a fan of recognition award programs -- especially when they honor great writing and have been around as long as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Now in its seventy-fourth year, the program was created by Edith Anisfield Wolf, a poet and civic activist who became passionately committed to social justice as a young girl growing up in Cleveland, and is the only juried American literary competition devoted to recognizing books that have made an important contribution to society's understanding of racism and the diversity of human cultures. The competition has been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since the death of Anisfield Wolf in 1963.

This year's Anisfield-Wolf winners are:

• Louise Erdrich -- The Plague of Doves (Harper Collins)
• Nam Le -- The Boat (Knopf)
• Annette Gordon-Read -- The Hemingses of Monticello (W.W. Norton)
• Paule Marshall -- Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to the winners! To learn more about the Anisfield-Wolf awards, click here.

-- Mitch Nauffts