The winners of the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Awards, announced during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, are:
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Nathan Hill for The Nix (Knopf)
Biography: Volker Ullrich for Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Knopf)
The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose: Wesley Lowery for They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (Little, Brown)
Current Interest: Svetlana Alexievich for Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich (Random House)
Fiction: Adam Haslett for Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown)
Graphic Novel/Comics: Nick Drnaso for Beverly (Drawn & Quarterly)
History: Benjamin Madley for An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Yale University Press)
Mystery/Thriller: Bill Beverly for Dodgers (Crown)
Poetry: Rosmarie Waldrop for Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (New Directions)
Science & Technology: Luke Dittrich for Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets (Random House)
Young Adult Literature: Frances Hardinge for The Lie Tree (Abrams)
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The finalists for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize, sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution, are:
The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by H.W. Brands (Doubleday)
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Blood River Rising: The Thompson-Crimson Feud of the 1920s by Victoria Pope Hubbell (Iris Press)
Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters (Mulholland Books)
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good by Colin Woodard (Viking)
The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalia Yang (Metropolitan Books)
The winning book will be announced in mid-May.
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Patricia Spears Jones has won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, sponsored by Poets & Writers and given to an American poet of "exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition." In their citation, the judges described Jones's poems as "made of fever, bones, and breath" and said she "has steadily and quietly enriched the American poetic tradition with sophisticated and moving poems. More of us should know who she is, and even more should read her."
Her most recent collection of poems is A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, published by White Pine Press in 2015. Her earlier books include Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010), Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995).