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In this 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair event, National Book Award honorees Donika Kelly and Danez Smith read from their work and discuss the power of poetry for both authors and readers in a conversation moderated by the Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation.
“Books sustain us. Books inspire us. Books fortify us. Books help us become who we are,” says poet John Keene in this video featuring National Book Award–winning authors—including Tess Gunty, Megan McDowell, Imani Perry, Samanta Schweblin, and Sabaa Tahir—speaking about why they believe books matter for the National Book Foundation’s Read With NBF program.
National Book Award nominees Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina (One World, 2019), and Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, 2021), discuss the convergences and divergences of rewriting shared memory across genres in this 2022 National Book Foundation event moderated by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
In this video, finalists for the 2022 National Book Award in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature read excerpts from their honored works. The event, hosted by writer Saraciea J. Fennell, is presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and the NYU Creative Writing Program.
“In the last year of her life, my mother Asako spoke more openly of the trauma of the war years and her incarceration at Topaz,” reads Karen Tei Yamashita for this event celebrating her work, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Yamashita was awarded the 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
“You knew that she was motivated by the basic concept that we’re here for a short while, and we have to make sure we make it about something larger than just ourselves.” In this video from the 2020 National Book Awards Ceremony, authors and colleagues speak about the influence of Carolyn Reidy, the late president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, who was honored with the National Book Foundation’s 2020 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Reidy died on May 12, 2020 at the age of seventy-one.
“She wasn’t sure if we were real, but nothing about us felt false.” Akwaeke Emezi, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree nominated by Carmen Maria Machado, reads from their debut novel, Freshwater (Grove Press, 2018). The novel has been longlisted for the 2019 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
“I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it would be something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room,” says Sigrid Nunez in her acceptance speech for the 2018 National Book Award in fiction, which she won for her seventh novel, The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018). “How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible: to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time.”
“My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns. / At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.” Jenny Xie, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads “Rootless” and “Ongoing” from her debut poetry collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Xie is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We live on the unanswerable, assert / that acknowledgment is inartistic, / history is regressive, and aggression / looks like no one we know…” Justin Phillip Reed reads from his debut poetry collection, Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), for which he won the 2018 National Book Award in poetry. Reed is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
