The Before Columbus Foundation announces the
Winners of the Forty-Sixth Annual
AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
Ceremonies, Sunday, October 26, 2025, 2:00 p.m.
Oakland, CA—The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Forty-Sixth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2025 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 26, 2025, at 2:00 p.m., at the Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, Room 315, on the UC Berkeley Campus, Berkeley, CA. This event is open to the public.
The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity; the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.
The 2025 American Book Award Winners
Kaveh Akbar
Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf)
Amy M. Alvarez
Makeshift Altar: Poems (The University Press of Kentucky)
Marie-Helene Bertino
Beautyland: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Percival Everett
James: A Novel (Doubleday)
Marcela Fuentes
Malas: A Novel (Penguin Books)
Fady Joudah
[…] Poems (Milkweed Editions)
Stacey Levine
Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press)
Sarah Lewis
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press)
Tomiko and Ryokuyo Matsumoto, and Nancy Matsumoto, Editor
By the Shore of Lake Michigan (UCLA Asian American Studies Center)
Sharon McMahon
The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement (Thesis)
Claire Messud
This Strange Eventful History: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company)
Maceo Montoya and Javier O. Huerta
Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century
Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press)
m.s. RedCherries
mother (Penguin Books)
Danzy Senna
Colored Television: A Novel (Riverhead Books)
A.B. Spellman, and Lauri Scheyer, Editor
Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press)
Lifetime Achievement Award
John Edgar Wideman
Editor/Publisher Award
Erroll McDonald, Vice President/Executive Editor, Penguin Random House
Anti-Censorship Award
Joy Reid
Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Kevin Killian, Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext(e))
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