American Book Awards

Der American Book Award wird seit 1980 von der Stiftung Before Colombus Foundation vergeben. Die Preisträger sind zeitgenössische Schriftsteller. Da der Preis auf kein Genre beschränkt ist und auch an die Schriftsteller keine weiteren Voraussetzungen wie Alter oder Nationalität gestellt werden, ist die Bandbreite der ausgezeichneten Werke besonders groß. Von 1980 bis 1986 wurden auch die National Book Awards auch als American Book Awards bezeichnet, sind aber unabhängig von den hier aufgeführten American Book Awards der Before Columbus Foundation.

[2011] [2010]
[2009] [2008] [2007] [2006] [2005] [2004] [2003] [2002] [2001] [2000]
[1999] [1998] [1997] [1996] [1995] [1994] [1993] [1992] [1991] [1990]
[1989] [1988] [1987] [1986] [1985] [1984] [1983] [1982] [1981] [1980]

American Book Awards 2011
Autor Titel
Keith Gilyard John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism
Akbar Ahmed Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam
Camille Dungy Suck on the Marrow
Karen Tei Yamashita I Hotel
William W. Cook
James H. Tatum
African American Writers and Classical Tradition
Gerald Vizenor Shrouds of White Earth
Eric Gansworth Extra Indians
Ivan Arguelles The Death of Stalin
Geoffrey Alan Argent The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: The Fratricides
Neela Vaswani You Have Given Me a Country
Sasha Pimentel Chacon Insides She Swallowed
Miriam Jimenez Roman
Juan Flores
The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States
Carmen Giménez Smith Bring Down the Little Birds
American Book Awards 2010
Autor Titel
Amiri Baraka Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music
Sherwin Bitsui Flood Song
Nancy Carnevale A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States,1890-1945
Dave Eggers Zeitoun
Sesshu Foster World Ball Notebook
Stephen D. Gutierrez Live from Fresno Y Los: Stories
Victor Lavalle Big Machine. Victor Lavalle
François Mandeville This Is What They Say
Bich Minh Nguyen Shorts Girls
Robin D.G. Kelley (Hrsg.), Franklin Rosemont (Hrsg.) Black,Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
Jerome Rothenberg (Hrsg.), Jeffrey C. Robinson (Hrsg.) Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three
Kathryn Waddell Takara Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems
Pamela Uschuk Crazy Love: New Poems
Katha Politt Antarctic Traveller (Lifetime Achievement Award)
Quincy Troupe The Architecture of Language (Lifetime Achievement Award)
American Book Awards 2009
Autor Titel
Houston A. Baker, Jr. Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era
Danit Brown Ask for a Convertible
Jericho Brown Please
José Antonio Burciaga The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes
Claire Hope Cummings Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds
Stella Pope Duarte If I Die in Juarez
Linda Gregg All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems
Suheir Hammad Breaking Poems
Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder
George E. Lewis A Power Stronger than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music
Patricia Santana Ghosts of El Grullo
Jack Spicer My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Miguel Algarín (Lifetime Achievement Award)
American Book Awards 2008
Autor Titel
Moustafa Bayoumi How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
Douglas A. Blackmon Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
Maria Mazziotti Gillan All That Lies Between Us
Nikki Giovanni The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
C. S. Giscombe Prairie Style
Angela Jackson Where I Must Go
L. Luis Lopez Each Month I Sing
Tom Lutz Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
Fae Myenne Ng Steer Toward Rock
Yuko Taniguchi The Ocean in the Closet
Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
Frank B. Wilderson III Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
Jonathan Curiel Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots
J.J. Phillips Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (Lifetime Achievement Award)
American Book Awards 2007
Daniel Cassidy for How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
Ernestine Hayes for Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
Gary Panter for Jimbo’s Inferno
Jeffrey F. L. Partridge for Beyond Literary Chinatown
Judith Roche for Wisdom of the Body
Kali Vanbaale for The Space Between
Michael Eric Dyson for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
Patricia Klindienst for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
Reyna Grande for Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
Rigoberto Gonzalez for Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
American Book Awards 2006
Carlton T. Spiller for Scalding Heart
Darryl Dickson-Carr for The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
David P. Diaz for The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second -Generation Mexican – American
Doris Seale for A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
Jay Wright for Transfigurations: Collected Poems
Josh Kun for Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
Kevin J. Mullen for The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
Mackenzie Bezos for The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel
Matt Briggs for Shoot the Buffalo
Matthew Shenoda for Somewhere Else
P. Lewis for Nate
Peter Metcalfe for Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
Thomas Ferraro for Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
Tim Z. Hernandez for Skin Tax
American Book Awards 2005
Alisha S. Drabek for The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
Bernard W. Bell for The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
Don Lee for Country of Origin: A Novel
Don West, Jeff Biggers, George Brosi for No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
Hiroshi Kashiwagi for Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
Julie Chibbaro for Redemption
Lamont B. Steptoe for A Long Movie of Shadows
Ralph M. Flores for The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
Richard A. Clarke for Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror
Cecelie Berry for Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood
American Book Awards 2004
A. Robert Lee for Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
Charisse Jones, Kumea Shorter-Gooden for Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
David Cole for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
Diana Abu-Jaber for Crescent: A Novel
Diane Sher Lutovich for What I Stole
Kristin Hunter Lattany for Breaking Away
Michael Walsh for And All the Saints
Renato Rosaldo for Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araa
Ruth L. Ozeki for All Over Creation
Scott Saul for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
American Book Awards 2003
Alejandro Murguía for This War Called Love
Daniel Ellsberg for Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Debra Magpie Earling for Perma Red
Eric Porter for What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
Igor Krupnik for Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
Jack Newfield for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
Jewell Parker Rhodes for Douglass‘ Women : A Novel
Joseph Papaleo for Italian Stories
Kevin Baker for Paradise Alley
Rachel Simon for Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
Rick Heide for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
Velma Wallis for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich’in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
American Book Awards 2002
Aaron Abeyta for Colcha
Al Young for The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000
Alex Kuo for Lipstick and Other Stories
Dana Gioia for Interrogations at Noon
Donald Phelps for Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
Gloria Frym for Homeless at Home
Jack Hirschman for Front Lines
Jessel Miller for Angels in the Vineyards
LeAnne Howe for Shell Shaker
Lerone Bennett for Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream
Michael N. Nagler for Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
Rilla Askew for Fire in Beulah
Susanne Antonetta for Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
Tananarive Due for The Living Blood
American Book Awards 2001
Amanda J. Cobb for Listening to Our Grandmothers‘ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
Andrea Dworkin for Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation
Carolyne Wright for Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
Chalmers Johnson for Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Cheri Register for Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir
Chris Ware for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Diana Garcia for When Living Was a Labor Camp
Elizabeth Nunez for Bruised Hibiscus
Janet McAdams for Island of Lost Luggage
Philip Whalen for Overtime: Selected Poems
Russell Leong for Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories
Sandra M. Gilbert for Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999
Ted Joans for Teducation
Tillie Olsen for Silences
William S. Penn for Killing Time With Strangers
American Book Awards 2000
Allan J. Ryan for The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art
Andrés Montoya for The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems
Camille Peri, Kate Moses for Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
David A. J. Richards for Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity
David Toop for Exotica
Elva Trevino Hart for Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child
Emil Guillermo for Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective; With an Introduction by Ishmael Reed
Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
Helen Thomas for Front Row at the White House : My Life and Times
Janisse Ray for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
John Russell Rickford, Russell John Rickford for Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
Leroy TeCube for Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier’s Story
Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Heads By Harry
Michael Lally for It’s Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose
Michael Patrick MacDonald for All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto for Why She Left Us: A Novel
Robert Creeley for The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005
American Book Awards 1999
Alice McDermott for Charming Billy
Anna Linzer for Ghost Dancing
Brian Ward for Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations
Chiori Santiago for Home to Medicine Mountain
E. Donald Two-Rivers for Survivor’s Medicine: Short Stories
Edwidge Danticat for The Farming of Bones
Judith Roche, Meg McHutchison for First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim
Gioia Timpanelli for Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily
Gloria Naylor for The Men of Brewster Place: A Novel
James D. Houston for The Last Paradise
Jerry Lipka, Gerald V. Mohatt, Ciulistet Group for Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup¡k Eskimo Examples
Trey Ellis for Right Here, Right Now
Josip Novakovich for Salvation and Other Disasters
Lauro Flores for The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature
Luís Alberto Urrea for Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life
Nelson George for Hip Hop America: Hip Hop and the Molding of Black Generation X
Speer Morgan for The Freshour Cylinders
Gary Gach for What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop
American Book Awards 1998
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Dog Road Woman
Angela Y. Davis for Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude „Ma“ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Brenda Marie Osbey for All Saints: New and Selected Poems
Don DeLillo for Underworld
Jim Barnes for On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
John A. Williams for Safari West: Poems
Nancy Rawles for Love Like Gumbo
Nora Okja Keller for Comfort Woman
Sandra Benitez for Bitter Grounds: A Novel
Scott DeVeaux for The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History
Thomas Lynch for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
American Book Awards 1997
Alurista for Et Tu … Raza
Derrick Bell for Gospel Choirs: Psalms Of Survival In An Alien Land Called Home
Dorothy Barresi for The Post-Rapture Diner
Guillermo Gomez-Pena for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
Louis Owens for Nightland
Martin Espada for Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems
Montserrat Fontes for Dreams of the Centaur: A Novel
Noel Ignatiev for Race Traitor
Shirley Geok-lin Lim for Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
Sunaina Maira for Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
Thulani Davis for Maker of Saints
Tom De Haven for Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies: A Novel
William M. Banks for Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life
Brenda Knight for Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
American Book Awards 1996
Agate Nesaule for A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
Arthur Sze for Archipelago
Chang-Rae Lee for Native Speaker
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for Arranged Marriage
E.J. Miller Laino for Girl Hurt
Glenn C. Loury for One by One from the Inside Out: Race and Responsibility in America
James W. Loewen for Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Joe Sacco, Edward Said for Palestine
Kimiko Hahn for The Unbearable Heart
Maria Espinosa for Longing
Robert Viscusi for Astoria
Sherman Alexie for Reservation Blues
Ron Sakolsky, Fred Weihan Ho for Sounding Off!: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution
Stephanie Cowell for The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke
William H. Gass for The Tunnel
American Book Awards 1995
Abraham Rodriguez for Spidertown: A Novel
Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology
Denise Chavez for Face of an Angel
John Egerton for Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
John Ross for Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas
Thomas Avena for Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS
Linda Raymond for Rocking the Babies: A Novel
Li-Young Lee for The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for Crossing Ocean Parkway
Marnie Mueller for Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest
Peter Quinn for Banished Children of Eve, A Novel of Civil War New York
Sandra Martz for I Am Becoming the Woman I’ve Wanted
Gordon Henry Jr. for The Light People
Tricia Rose for Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
American Book Awards 1994
Giose Rimanelli for Benedetta in Guysterland
Eric Drooker for Flood!: A Novel in Pictures
Graciela Limón for In Search of Bernabe
Gregory J. Reed for Economic Empowerment Through the Church
Janet Campbell Hale for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
Jill Nelson for Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
Lawson Fusao Inada for Legends from Camp
Nicole Blackman for Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Paul Gilroy for The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
Ronald Takaki for A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
Rose L. Glickman for Daughters of Feminists
Tino Villanueva for Scene from the Movie GIANT
Virginia L. Kroll for Wood-Hoopoe Willie
American Book Awards 1993
Asake Bomani, Belvie Rooks for Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris
Christopher Mogil, Peter Woodrow for We Gave Away a Fortune
Cornel West for Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
Denise Giardina for Unquiet Earth
Diane Glancy for Claiming Breath
Eugene B. Redmond for The Eye in the Ceiling
Francisco X. Alarcón for Snake Poems
Gerald Graff for Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
Jack Beatty for The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
Leroy V. Quintana for The History of Home
Katherine Peter for Neets’aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country
Nelson George for Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball
Ninotchka Rosca for Twice Blessed: A Novel
American Book Awards 1992
A’Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
Art Spiegelman for The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
Benjamin Alire Saenz for Calendar of Dust
Donna J. Haraway for Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Fritjof Capra for Belonging to the universe: Explorations on the frontiers of science and spirituality
Jose Antonio Burciaga for Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado: A Personal Anthology of Poetry
Keith Gilyard for Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence
Lucy Thompson for To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman
Norma Field for In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End
Peter Bacho for Cebu
Peter Kalifornsky for Dena’ina Legacy: K’tl’egh’i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky
Raymond Andrews for Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire
Sandra Scofield for Beyond Deserving
Sheila Hamanaka for Journey
Stephen R. Fox for The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans During World War II
Steven R. Carter for Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity,
Verlyn Klinkenborg for The Last Fine Time
William B. Branch, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson for Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama
American Book Awards 1991
Alejandro Murguía for Southern Front
Bell Hooks for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Bruce Wright for Black Robes, White Justice: Why Our Legal System Doesn’t Work for Blacks
Charley Trujillo for Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam
D. H. Melhem for Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews
Deborah Keenan for Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile
Jessica Hagedorn for Dogeaters
John Edgar Wideman for Philadelphia Fire: A Novel
Joy Harjo for In Mad Love and War
Karen Tei Yamashita for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Lucia Berlin for Homesick: New and Selected Stories
Mary Crow Dog for Lakota Woman
Meridel Le Sueur for Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories
Mill Hunk Herald Collective for Overtime: Punchin‘ Out With the Mill Hunk Herald Magazine
Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer for Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory
R. Baxter Miller for The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes
Thomas Centolella for Terra Firma
American Book Awards 1990
Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
Elizabeth Woody for Hand into Stone: Poems
Hualing Nieh for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
Itabari Njeri for Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone
James M. Freeman for Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives
John C. Walter, J. Raymond Jones for The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970
John Norton for Light at the End of the Bog
José Emilio González for Vivar a Hostos
Sergei Kan for Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century
Lloyd A. Thompson for Romans and Blacks
Martin Bernal for Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster for Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry
Miles Davis for Miles
Paula Gunn Allen for Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology
Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)
American Book Awards 1989
Alma Luz Villanueva for The Ultraviolet Sky
Askia M. Touré for From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance!
Audre Lorde for A Burst of Light
Carolyn Lau for Wode Shuofa: My Way of Speaking
Emory Elliott for Columbia Literary History of the United States
Eduardo Galeano for Genesis
Frank Chin for The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.
Henry Louis Gates for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Isabel Allende for Eva Luna
J. California Cooper for Homemade Love
Jennifer Stone for Stone’s Throw
Josephine Gattuso Hendin for The Right Thing to Do
Leslie Scalapino for way
Shuntaro Tanikawa for Floating the River in Melancholy
Charles Fanning for The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction
William Minoru Hohri for Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese American Redress
American Book Awards 1988
Allison Blakely for Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought
Charles Olson for The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems
Daisy Bates for The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir
David Halberstam for The Reckoning
Edward Sanders for Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Poems 1961-1985
Gerald Vizenor for Griever: An American Monkey King in China
Jimmy Santiago Baca for Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
Kesho Y. Scott, Cherry Muhanji, Egyirba High for Tight Spaces
Marlon K. Hom for Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
Opal Whiteley for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
Ronald Sukenick for Down and in: Life in the Underground
Salvatore La Puma for The Boys of Bensonhurst
Toni Morrison for Beloved
Wing Tek Lum, Tek Lum Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points
American Book Awards 1987
Ai for SIN
Ana Castillo for The Mixquiahuala Letters
Cyn Zarco for Circumnavigations
Daniel McGuire for Portrait of Little Boy in darkness
Dorothy Bryant for Confessions of Madame Psyche: Memoirs and Letters of Mei-Li Murrow
Etheridge Knight for The Essential Etheridge Knight
Gary Giddins for Celebrating Bird: The Triumph Of Charlie Parker
Harvey Pekar for The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland
James Welch for Fools Crow
John Wieners for Selected Poems: 1958-1984
Juan Felipe Herrera for Face Games
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum for liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy
Michael Mayo for Practicing Angels: A Contemporary Anthology of San Francisco Bay Area Poetry
Septima Poinsette Clark, Cynthia Stokes Brown for Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative
Terry McMillan for Mama
American Book Awards 1986
Anna Lee Walters for The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories
Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Helen Barolini for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian American Women
Jeff Hannusch for I Hear You Knockin : The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues
Linda Hogan for Seeing Through the Sun
Miguel Algarín for Time’s Now/Ya Es Tiempo
Natasha Borovsky for A Daughter of the Nobility
Raymond Federman for Smiles on Washington Square: A Love Story of Sorts
Susan Howe for My Emily Dickinson
Terence Winch for Irish Musicians/American Friends
Toshio Mori for Yokohama, California
American Book Awards 1985
Angela Jackson for Solo in the Box Car Third Floor E
Arnold Genthe, John Kuo Wei Tchen for Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown
Colleen J. McElroy for Queen of the Ebony Isles
Gary Soto for Living Up The Street
Peter Irons for Justice at War
Keiho Soga, Taisanboku Mori, Sojin Takei, Muin Ozaki for Poets Behind Barbed Wire
Louise Erdrich for Love Medicine: A Novel
Maureen Owen for Amelia Earhart
May Sarton for At Seventy: A Journal
Robert Edward Duncan for Ground Work: Before the War
Ron Jones for Say Ray
Sandra Cisneros for The House on Mango Street
Sonia Sanchez for Homegirls and Handgrenades
William Oandasan for Round Valley Songs
American Book Awards 1984
Cecil Brown for Days Without Weather
Gary Snyder for Axe Handles: Poems
Howard Schwartz, Mark Podwal for The Captive Soul of the Messiah: New Tales About Reb Nachman
Imamu Amiri Baraka for Anthology of African American Women: Confirmation Men
Jesús Colón for A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches
Joseph Bruchac for Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets
Maurice Kenny for The Mama Poems
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for The heat bird
Miné Okubo for Citizen 13660
Paule Marshall for Praisesong for the Widow
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, You-shan Tang, Ellen Lai-shan Yeung for Pie-Biter
Thomas McGrath for Echoes inside the labyrinth
Venkatesh Kulkarni for Naked in Deccan
William J. Kennedy for O Albany!
American Book Awards 1983
Barbara Christian for Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976
Cecilia Liang for Chinese Folk Poetry
Evangelina Vigil-Piñón for Thirty: An‘ Seen a Lot
Harriet Rohmer for Legend of Food Mountain: LA Montana Del Alimento
James D. Houston for Californians: Searching for the Golden State
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn for Pet food & tropical apparitions
John A. Williams for Click Song: A Novel
Joy Kogawa for Obasan
Judy Grahn for The Queen of Wands: Poetry
Nash Candelaria for Not by the Sword
Peter Guralnick for Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians
Seán Ó Tuama for An Duanaire Sixteen Hundred to Nineteen Hundred: Poems of the Dispossessed
American Book Awards 1982
Al Young for Bodies and Soul
Duane Niatum for Songs for the Harvester of Dreams: Poems
E. L. Mayo for Collected Poems E L Mayo
Frank Chin for The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon
Hilton Obenzinger for This Passover or the next, I will never be in Jerusalem
Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung for Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940
Jerome Rothenberg for Pre-Faces and Other Writings
Joyce Carol Thomas for Marked by Fire
Leroy Quintana for Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets
Lorna Dee Cervantes for Emplumada
Ronald Phillip Tanaka for The Shino Suite: Japanese-American Poetry
Russell Banks for Book of Jamaica
Tato Laviera for Enclave
American Book Awards 1981
Alta for Shameless Hussy
Alan Chong Lau for Songs for Jadina
Bienvenido N. Santos for Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories
Helen Adam for Turn Again to Me & Other Poems
Lionel Mitchell for Traveling Light
Miguel Algarín for On Call
Nicholasa Mohr for Felita
Peter Blue Cloud for Back Then Tomorrow
Robert Kelly for The Time of Voice: Poems 1994-1996
Rose Drachler for The Choice
Susan Howe for The Liberties
Toni Cade Bambara for The Salt Eaters
American Book Awards 1980
Douglas Woolf for Future preconditional: A collection
Edward Dorn for Hello, La Jolla
Jayne Cortez for Mouth on Paper
Leslie Marmon Silko for Ceremony
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for Random Possession
Milton Murayama for All I Asking for Is My Body
Quincy Troupe for Snake Back Solos
Rudolfo Anaya for Tortuga: A Novel