Winners were announced for the 2017 American Book Awards, which are sponsored by the Before Columbus Foundation "to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community." The honorees will be formally recognized October 22 at the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco. This year's American Book Award winners are:
Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After 'Serial' by Rabia Chaudry (St. Martin's)
Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration by Flores A. Forbes (Skyhorse Publishing)
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Knopf)
Passings by Holly Hughes (Expedition Press)
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar (Sarabande Books)
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden (Akashic Books)
Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow by Brian D. McInnes (Michigan State University Press)
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips (Norton)
Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination by Vaughn Rasberry (Harvard University Press)
Year of the Rat by Marc Anthony Richardson (Fiction Collective Two)
Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan (Knopf)
See You in the Streets: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire by Ruth Sergel (University of Iowa Press)
Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)
Memory Foam by Adam Soldofsky (Disorder Press)
The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa (University of Oklahoma Press)
Seeing the Light: Four Decades in Chinatown by Dean Wong (Chin Music Press)
Lifetime Achievement: Nancy Mercado
Editor/Publisher Award: Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Ammiel Alcalay, general editor