American Book Awards. Winners. 2001 to present

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The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation Book Awards

The American Book Awards, established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. The purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing. The American Book Aw ards 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.

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Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual American Book Award

Dec, 2008- Oakland, CA — The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2008 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, December 28th at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way in Berkeley, CA. The awards will take place from 4 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.

Authors attending will read selections from their works and sign copies of their award-winning books. A reception and book signing will take place following the ceremony. This event is free to the public. For more information, call (510) 681-5652.

California Poet Laureate Al Young will host the event. Al Young was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger, who has said of Mr. Young, “Al Young is a poet, an educator and a man with a passion for the arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration."

Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press)

ISBN-10: 1594201765
ISBN-13: 978-159420176

Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classis The Souls of Black Folk: "How does it feel to be a problem?” he asked. Today, Arab and Muslim Americans, the newest minorities in the American imagination, are the latest “problem” of American society, and their answers to Du Bois’s question increasingly define what being American means today.

In a wholly revealing portrait of a community that lives next door and yet a world away, Moustafa Bayoumi introduces us to the individual lives of seven twentysomething men and women living in Brooklyn, home to the largest number of Arab Americans in the United States. Through telling real stories about young people in Brooklyn, Bayoumi jettisons the stereotypes and clichés that constantly surround Arabs and Muslims and allows us instead to enter their worlds and experience their lives. We meet Rasha, Sami, Lina, Akram, Yasmin, Omar and Rami and discover through them often-unseen entanglements: government surveillance and detentions, workplace discrimination, warfare in their countries of origin, threats of vigilante violence, the infiltration of spies and informants into their midst, and the disappearance of friends or family. Their richly told stories connect us to their quests for meaning, from falling in love to finding God, and we feel their triumphs and watch them stumble along the way. As their lives turn on the winds of global conflicts, these young Arab Americans manage the major issues of our day while forging the contours of our future society. What the stories in this book prove is that the fight for equality and the commitment to compassion are as necessary today as ever, if not more so.

Moustafa Bayoumi immerses his reader in a reality at once inconceivable and achingly familiar to unveil an unforgettable American story of race, religion, and civil rights, full of struggle, promise and hope.

Review
“As Moustafa Bayoumi argues in his provocative investigation, young Arab-Americans are still struggling to define their identities in a hostile environment and to cope with the governments distrust…despite what they have suffered and continue to endure, Bayoumi and his interview subjects still hope that America is a place where they can live in peace—and find justice, fairness, and freedom.” —Francine Prose, O Magazine

“In How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Bayoumi…gives twenty-something Arab-Americans the chance to talk about their victories and defeats.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“These are great stories about people who might be your neighbors, and Bayoumi delivers them with urgency, compassion, wryness and hints of poetry. You may walk away from the book with a much greater understanding of Arab-American life, but you'll feel that's simply because you've hung out with Bayoumi and friends, snarfing down Dunkin' Donuts or puffing on hookahs, talking about vital issues.” —Salon.com

“Bayoumi's book fascinates.” —Deborah Douglas, Chicago Sun-Times

“Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? has an intimate feel, as the author listens closely to the dreams and realities of seven young Arabs living in post-9/11 America.” —Dallas Morning News

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday)

ISBN-10: 0385722702
ISBN-13: 978-0385722704

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II.

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies which discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. Back to top

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black,

Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka/Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804 (University of Washington Press)

ISBN-10: 0295986018
ISBN-13: 978-0295986012

Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) has released a major book on historic battles between the Russians and Tlingits in the early 19th century.

Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká: Russians in Tlingit America, The Battles of Sitka 1802 and 1804, edited by Richard and Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Lydia Black, is the 4th volume in the award-winning series, Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature.

The book explores an era from the 1790s through 1818 when Russians expanded into Southeast Alaska to take control of the Northwest Coast fur trade. The Tlingit people resisted the incursion into their ancestral homeland and events culminated in two historic battles between the Russians and Tlingits in 1802 and 1804.

At the heart of the book are never-before published recordings by the National Park Service of Tlingit elders telling oral histories of the battles. The recordings were made in the 1950s by Kiks.ádi elder Sally Hopkins and Kaagwaantaan elder Alex Andrews, who was a child of the Kiks.ádi. The book was conceived 20 years ago when Kiks.ádi elders asked the Dauenhauers to transcribe, translate, and publish the tapes, and the Sealaska Heritage Board approved the project. The Dauenhauers were able to compare the recordings to eye-witness accounts by Russians translated into English by Lydia Black, a scholar who worked on the book until her death in 2007.

“We’re not dealing with second-hand information. We’re dealing almost exclusively with first hand accounts, so we have the Tlingit first-hand accounts and then we have Russian first-hand accounts, many of which have never been published even in Russia,” said Dauenhauer, calling it one of the most complex books he and his wife, Nora, have undertaken. “We were amazed with the amount of agreement on most of the major events.”

The book also is important because it recounts events from the Tlingit point of view, which is missing from Alaska history books, said Nora Dauenhauer.

“Our children don’t have anything in history in schools or anywhere, and one of the things we hope we’ll use this book for is in schools where people teach history without Tlingits,” she said. “I’m just so happy that we have this story to fall back on and for students to realize that they have a history also.”

Other important accounts from the Tlingit perspective include transcriptions of two recently discovered recordings in English by Andrew P. Johnson dating from the 1970s, and histories by Mark Jacobs, Jr. and Herb Hope written in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

The book is exciting because it brings to life the Tlingit war hero K’alyáan (commonly referred to as Katlian), a Kiks.ádi who is well known in Tlingit oral traditions, said SHI President Rosita Worl. A portrait by Clarissa Hudson of K’alyáan is featured on the book cover and a reproduced watercolor of him is included in the book’s color section, which was funded by a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation.

“We’ve known about him, but hopefully now the public is going to be able to read about this very famous Tlingit person who led the Tlingits to success in this 1802 battle,” Worl said. Back to top

Maria Mazziotti Gillian, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions Inc.)

Constructed in the form of a memoir, these poems take on an emotional tone as the author details the story of her life. The collection is populated by her memories of childhood, courtships and marriage, family illness, children, and grandchildren. At its core is a woman struggling to deal with all the complexities of love and the difficulties of achieving compassion and tenderness in the face of adversity. Brave, honest, and beautiful, these poems shed new light on what it means to be human.

Review

"These poems are powerful in their honesty, their passion and their grief. They take us deep into the labyrinth of our humanity and—in the face of loss and death—show us the paradox of love in the center of our being." —Diane di Prima, poet and author, Memoirs of a Beatnik

About the Author

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College–New Jersey. She has published eight books and is the editor of the award-winning Paterson Literary Review.

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins)

ISBN-10: 0060724293
ISBN-13: 978-006072429

For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures.

When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial, and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape.

The first of its kind, this omnibus collection covers Nikki Giovanni's complete work of poetry from three decades, 1968–1998. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni contains Giovanni's first seven volumes of poetry: Black Feeling Black Talk, Black Judgement, Re: Creation, My House, The Women and the Men, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds. Arranged chronologically with a biographical timeline and introduction, a new afterword from the author, title and first-line indexes, and extensive notes to the poems, this collection is the testimony of a life's work -- from one of America's most beloved daughters and powerful poets.

Known for their iconic revolutionary phrases, Black Feeling Black Talk (1968), Black Judgement (1968), and Re: Creation (1970) are heralded as being among the most important volumes of contemporary poetry. My House (1972) marks a new dimension in tone and philosophy -- it signifies a new self-confidence and maturity as Giovanni artfully connects the private and the public, the personal and the political. In The Women and the Men (1975), Giovanni displays her compassion for the people, things, and places she has encountered -- she reveres the ordinary and is in search of the extraordinary. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) is one of the most poignant and introspective. These poems chronicle the drastic change that took place during the 1970s -- in both the consciousness of the nation and in the soul of the poet -- when the dreams of the Civil Rights era seemed to have evaporated. Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) is devoted to "the day trippers and midnight cowboys," the ones who have devoted their lives to pushing the limits of the human condition and shattering the constraints of the status quo.

Each volume reflects the changes Giovanni has endured as a Black woman, lover, mother, teacher, and poet. A timeless classic, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni is the evocation of a nation's past and present -- intensely personal and fiercely political -- from one of our most compassionate, vibrant observers. Back to top

C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press)

Prairie Style is about the breakdown of location and voice. It lays out a landscape of habitations (Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for “servantless families,” fox dens in an embankment, the two-mile long face of Chicago’s Robert Taylor public housing project, etc.) and crosses and recrosses the line between poetry and prose. The book is an acknowledgment of the “terrible frankness” of color, pleasure’s distance, and the similarity of equivocation and argument. Prairie Style is the turn inland. “Inland, one needs something more racial, say bigger, than mountains.”

About the Author

C. S. Giscombe is the author of several books of poetry, including Giscome Road and Here, both of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press. He has also published a memoir entitled Into and Out of Dislocation. He is the editor of Mixed Blood, a poetry journal, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Praise

“[A] major figure in contemporary African American letters.”—Henry Louis Gates

“Giscombe’s concise poems—which are always essentially unpredictable—have an odd and vivid beauty. They move in intricately woven patterns (like the candid language of risky dreams), from the emotional depths of the most private places to places post-personal yet not quite public. And they make this journey with elegance, eloquence, wit, knife-sharp observations, and tenderness.”—Clarence Major

“C. S. Giscombe makes evident a genius of attention to all the determinants of any one of us, our particulars, our people. He traces with consummate art the passage of time through his own accumulating presence, his points of origin and return.”—Robert Creeley Back to top

Angela Jackson, Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly)

ISBN-10: 0810151855
ISBN-13: 978-0810151857

L. Luis Lopez, Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press)

A book or poetry based on the twelve months of the year. There are twelve poems for each month, the first six having to do with the name of the month, the flower of the month, the gem of the month, the zodiac sign it enters under, a famous writer born that month, and a famous painter born that month. The other six have to do with the author's experiences for that month. Various types of poetry are included in the text.

Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Couch potatoes, goof-offs, freeloaders, good-for-nothings, loafers, and loungers: ever since the Industrial Revolution, when the work ethic as we know it was formed, there has been a chorus of slackers ridiculing and lampooning the pretensions of hardworking respectability. Whenever the world of labor changes in significant ways, the pulpits, politicians, and pedagogues ring with exhortations of the value of work, and the slackers answer with a strenuous call of their own: “To do nothing,” as Oscar Wilde said, “is the most difficult thing in the world.”

Moving with verve and wit through a series of case studies that illuminate the changing place of leisure in the American republic, Doing Nothing revises the way we understand slackers and work itself.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lutz eases readers into this sparkling cultural history of stylish American torpor with an anecdote about his 18-year-old son, Cody, moving into his house and bivouacking on the couch—perhaps indefinitely. Lutz himself spent a decade before college "wandering here and abroad," so his intense anger at Cody surprised him—and inspired him to write this book about the crashing fault lines between Anglo-America's vaunted Calvinist work ethic and its skulking, shrugging love of idling. An English professor who admits to being personally caught between these warring impulses, Lutz (Crying) has a gimlet eye for the ironies of modern loafing: that the "flaming youth" of the 1920s were intensely industrious; that our most celebrated slackers (Jack Kerouac, Richard Linklater) have been closet workaholics; that our most outspoken Puritans (Benjamin Franklin, George W. Bush) have been notorious layabouts. Lutz's diligent research on a range of lazy and slovenly subjects, from French flâneurs to New York bohos, ultimately leads him to side with the bums. Flying in the face of yuppie values and critics of the welfare state, his "slacker ethic" emerges over the course of this history as both a necessary corrective to—and an inevitable outgrowth of—the 80-hour work week. (May)

From Booklist
Samuel Johnson identified literary loafers in his periodicalIdler (1758-60), and here Lutz lays sharp-eyed analysis on society's reaction toward those who repudiate regular work. Productively informing his appraisals of the Thoreaus and Kerouacs with his own youthful experiment in communal^B living, Lutz weaves no grand theory of the slacker because he finds that wastrels have been different in every generation. In the late 1700s, a disinclination to work was an aristocratic affectation. In reaction to industrialism, the back-to-nature primitivist appeared, embodied by Thoreau, while cultural vulgarity made the Gilded Age vulnerable to the effete cynicism of an Oscar Wilde. In Wilde and others, Lutz nails, with concise sophistication, the mix of anger and amusement such nonconformists provoked. Though a serious study of spongers, this wry book is fun to read. With layabouts such as Theodore Dreiser, the Beats, and our epoch's own Anna Nicole Simpson on offer, cultural-history mavens won't be able to pass Lutz up. Gilbert Taylor

Review

“Highly intelligent, stimulatingly eclectic, and impressively learned.” —Gary Kamiya, Salon

“Enjoyable and interesting . . . As much about the nature of work as it is about trying to avoid it.”—Matthew Price, Los Angeles Times

“Incredibly engaging and offbeat meditation . . . A deliciously wild ride.” —Elaine Margolin, The Denver Post

About the Author

Tom Lutz ’s previous books include Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears; American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History; and Cosmopolitan Vistas. He lives in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion)

“The woman I loved wasn’t in love with me; the woman I married wasn’t a wife to me. Ilin Cheung was my wife on paper. In deed, she belonged to Yi-Tung Szeto. In debt, I also belonged to him. He was my father, paper too.”

Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s heartbreaking novel of unrequited love, tells the story of the only bachelor butcher at the Universal Market in San Francisco. Jack Moon Szeto—that was the name he bought, the name he made his life by—serves the lonely grass widows whose absentee husbands work the farmlands in the Central Valley. A man who knows that the body is the only truth, Jack attends to more than just their weekly orders of lamb or beef.

But it is the free-spirited, American-born Joice Qwan with whom Jack falls in love. A woman whose life is guided by more than simple pain, Joice hands out towels at the Underground Bathhouse and sells tickets at the Great Star Theatre; her mother cleans corpses. Joice wants romance and she wants to escape Chinatown, but Jack knows that she is his ghost of love, better chased than caught.

It is the 1960s and while the world is on the edge of an exciting future, Jack has not one grain of choice in his life. When his paper wife arrives from China he is forced to fulfill the last part of his contract and to stand before the law with the woman who is to serve as mistress to his fake father. Jack has inherited a cruel cultural legacy. A man with no claim to the past, his only hope is to make a new story for himself, one that includes both Joice and America.

Not since Bone, Fae Myenne Ng’s highly praised debut novel, has a work so eloquently revealed the complex loyalties of Chinese America. Steer Toward Rock is the story of a man who chooses love over the law, illuminating a part of U.S. history few are aware of, but one that has had echoing effects for generations.

About the Author

Fae Myenne Ng was born in San Francisco. Her work received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Foundation and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. Bone, a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner, was a national bestseller and a critical success. Her short stories have appeared in Harper’s and other magazines, and have been widely anthologized.

Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press)

A girl reaches across an ocean to heal three generations from the aftermath of war.

Nine-year-old Helen Johnson can’t understand why her mother locks Helen and her brother in the closet of their 1975 California home or why her father, recently returned from Vietnam, seems so distant. On the other side of the ocean, Helen’s great-uncle Hideo still struggles with the death of his sister during the occupation of Japan after World War II. When Helen travels to Japan to meet Hideo they start to unravel the circumstances of her mother’s adoption from Japan and the role that both World War II and the Vietnam War play in her family’s legacy. A lovely paean to the strength and resilience of the young and the capacity for love and forgiveness in the old, The Ocean in the Closet is a call for peace and understanding in dark times.

From Publishers Weekly
Helen Johnson, the nine-year-old narrator of Taniguchi's slight debut novel, shoulders the burden of her war-scarred family's sadness. Watching Saigon's evacuation on television, Helen's parents are already suffering from post-traumatic depression: her deeply depressed mother was born in Japan after World War II, the child of a Caucasian soldier and a Japanese woman, while her father is haunted by his tour of duty in Vietnam. When her mother is institutionalized, Helen and her brother are sent to live with their uncle, Steve. A few conversations with Steve give Helen the courage to contact her mother's Japanese uncle, Hideo, in an attempt to understand her mother's past. Though Taniguchi divides narrative duties between Helen and Hideo, their voices are largely indistinct, and their need for connection forced. Very little actually happens, and most metaphors—like the ocean of the title—are flogged into uselessness. A more astute narrator might have risen to the challenge, but Helen is too naïve—even for her age—to carry it off.

Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press)

n 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank Wilderson, one of only two Black American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President Nelson Mandela considered him “a threat to national security.” Wilderson was asked to comment. Incognegro is that “comment.” It is also his response to a question posed five years later by a student in a California university classroom: “How come you came back?”

Although Wilderson recollects his turbulent life in South Africa during the furious last gasps of apartheid, Incognegro is a quintessentially American story. Wilderson taught at Johannesburg and Soweto universities by day. By night, he helped the ANC coordinate clandestine propaganda, launch psychological warfare, and more. In this mesmerizing memoir, Wilderson’s lyrical prose flows from childhood episodes in the white Minneapolis enclave “integrated” by his family to a rebellious adolescence at the student barricades in Berkeley and under tutelage of the Black Panther Party; from unspeakable dilemmas in the red dust and ruin of South Africa to political battles raging quietly on US campuses and in his intimate life. Readers will find themselves suddenly overtaken by the subtle but resolute force of Wilderson’s biting wit, rare vulnerability, and insistence on bearing witness to history no matter the cost.

A literary tour de force sure to spark fierce debate in both America and South Africa, Incognegro retells a story most Americans assume we already know, with a sometimes awful, but ultimately essential clarity about global politics and our own lives.

Frank B. Wilderson, III is the award-winning author of Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and the director of Reparations…Now (in-progress).

A Fine Crop of American Award Winners for 2007 Reflect the Nations Diversity

Michael Eric Dysons (right) , Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, the first major book about Katrina, one of the nations worst natural disasters, has won one of the ten American Book Awards for 2007. Dyson's volume not only chronicles what happened when, it also argues that the nation's failure to offer timely aid to Katrina's victims indicates deeper problems in race and class relations.

Dr. Dyson has been named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans, and is the author of fourteen books, including the American Award winner. He is University Professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches Theology, English and African American Studies.

Reyna_Grande Jeffrey Partridge, author of Beyond Literary Chinatown (American Ethnic and Cultural Studies is another of the a wonderfully eclectic bunch of winners of this years awards. The book was described by Shawn Wong, of the University of Washington as “...the first work to consider the importance of Asia and the global economy and the influence of an Asian diaspora on Chinese American literature .” This important contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies andAmerican literature.

Reyna Grande (left), a 2003 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, turns in a topical and heartbreaking border story for her debut, Across a Hundred Mountains: A NovelGrande's deft portraiture endows even the smallest characters with grace, as two stories cross and re-cross in unexpected ways, driving toward a powerful conclusion.

In a series of lively essays, Daniel Cassidy's, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch), proves that US slang has its strongest wellsprings in nineteenth-century Irish America. "Jazz" and "poker," "sucker" and "scam" all derive from Irish. While demonstrating this, Daniel Cassidy simultaneously traces the hidden history of how Ireland fashioned America, not just linguistically, but through the Irish gambling underworld, urban street gangs, and the powerful political machines that grew out of them. Cassidy uncovers a secret national heritage, long discounted by our WASP-dominated culture.

Publishers Week had this to say about Patricia Klindienst's, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America (Beacon Press)

Though Klindienst imposes a strong philosophical structure on the narratives in this poetic collection, her political interpretations come second to the beauty and humor in what is essentially a set of portraits of both American gardens and gardeners. Woven into these stories are wide-ranging details of agricultural history: how to make blue corn piki bread, how the injustice of post-emancipation land sales affected one farmer, the fragrance of the sweet-sticky-pumpkin flower b Roberto_Gonzalez rought by refugees from Cambodia. Klindienst's writing shines when recounting her conversations with farmers, but her analysis of "hunger for community" and how a "garden can be a powerful expression of resistance" feels awkward.

Rigoberto Gonzalez (left), Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad, written n the tradition of Richard Rodriguez, evokes a stirring butterfly_boy_cover memoir of a first-generation Mexican American's coming-of-age and coming out in a wrenching, angry, passionate, ironic, and always eloquent story about conflicts of family, class, and sexuality. A moving memoir of a young Chicano boy's maturing into a self-accepting gay adult is a beautifully executed portrait of the experience of being gay, Chicano and poor in the United States.

Ernestine Hayes, an assistant professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast and historian of her mother's Lingit tribe, was recognized for a Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir. 'This sometimes raw, consistently honest memoir is a rewarding, evocative, ultimately uplifting view of Native life' (Deborah Donavan -Booklist)

Gary Panter has won three Emmys for the wildly imaginative sets of Pee Wee's Playhouse, yet he's probably best known for his underground comics featuring punkster Jimbo. In Jimbo in Purgatory (2004), he sent his creation through a gigantic infotainment testing center resembling Dante's Mount Purgatory. The American Award winner, Jimbo's Inferno, continues the itinerary as Jimbo's Virgil, the robot Valise (who resembles a boxy riding mower), accompanies him through a vast shopping mall that contains a modern vision of hell. A Boschian art mixes both the grotesque and comic as we accompany the pair on their journey.

Patricia Monaghan describes Judith Roche' s,Wisdom of the Body beautifully in her April, 2007 Booklist Review.

In her luminous third collection, Roche's subject is the body as a cultural and spiritual as well as physical form. In the magnificent 'Credo,' she lists what sustains her: 'I believe in the cave paintings at Lascaux,/ The beauty of the clavicle,/ The journey of the salmon...I believe in the wisdom of the body.' That wisdom isn't without pain, and the book is haunted by the deaths that occur when 'Someone will come at the end/ and tell you a story so beautiful/ you will rise out of yourself/ and go into it,' as she almost did, she tells us in an autobiographical poem about nearly drowning. Yet the body's wisdom is expanded rather than limited by death, which enjoins us to more vivid life: 'The mouth knows the taste of its own tongue/ hungers for savor, makes meaning/ of sound, trying to name truth.' This is a powerful and courageous book, full of lyric intensity and crystal-sharp imagery. -

The final award winner for 2007 was Kali Vanbaale's, emotional and thought provoking The Space Between.

2007 American Book Award Winners

(Click on links to books for reviews on Amazon where available)

Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads (Counterpunch) CounterPunch/AK Press_ For an excellent description of book from Counterpunch- Click Here

Michael Eric Dyson, (Basic Books)Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
- Mr. Dysons Home page Click here

Rigoberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad)(University of Wisconsin Press) Mr. Gonzalez's Home page Click here

Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
Reyna Grande Home page Click here

Ernestine Hayes, Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir (Sun Tracks)(Arizona Press) 'Ernestine Hayes faced discrimination and difficulty on long journey home to Juneau'

Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America (Beacon Press) "In Their Words: Patricia Klindienst"

Gary Panter Jimbo's Inferno,(Fantagraphics Books)
Mr. Panters Home Page Click Here

Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown (American Ethnic and Cultural Studies(University of Washington Press)- Book description

Judith Roche,Wisdom of the Body (Black Heron Press)- Wiki Bio

Kali Vanbaale, The Space Between(River City Publishing)
Kali Vanbaale Home Page

2006 American Book Awards

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MacKenzie Bezos, The Testing of Luther Albright : A Novel (Fourth Estate)-

Matt Briggs, Shoot the Buffalo (Clear Cut Press) -
David Diaz, The White Tortilla (BookSurge)

Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (The Columbia Guides to Literature Since 1945 ) (Columbia University Press)

Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (Nation of Newcomers) (New York University Press)

Tim Z. Hernandez, Skin Tax (Heyday Books)

Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads)(University of California Press)P. Lewis, Nate (Back House Books)

Peter Metcalfe, Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, (SEARHC Foundation)

Kevin J. Mullen, The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories From Old San Francisco (Noir Publications)

Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, editors, A Broken Flute: The Native Experience

Previous Winners of American Book Awards 2000 to Present

2005

The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches, Bernard W. Bell
Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood, Cecelie Berry
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang
Redemption, Julie Chibbaro
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, Richard A. Clarke
The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey, Alisha S. Drabek and Karen R. Adams
The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family, Ralph M. Flores
Swimming in the American: A Memoir and Selected Writings, Hiroshi Kashiwagi
Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Country of Origin, Don Lee
Long Movie of Shadows, Lamont B. Steptoe
No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems, Don West

2004

Crescent, Diana Abu-Jaber

Enemy Aliens, David Cole
Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America, Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Ph.D.

Breaking Away, Kristin Lattany
Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a, and Asian American Fictions, A. Robert Lee

What I Stole, Diane Sher Lutovich

All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki
Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araña, Renato Rosaldo
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of The Sixties, Scott Saul

And All the Saints, Michael Walsh

2003

Paradise Alley, Kevin Baker
Perma Red, Debra Magpie Earling
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg
Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California, Rick Heide, editor
Akuzilleput Igaqullghet, Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History, Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga, and Vera Metcalf, editors; compiled by Igor Krupnik and Lars Krutak

This War Called Love: Nine Stories, Alejandro Murguía

The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania, Jack Newfield

Italian Stories, Joseph Papaleo
What Is This Thing Called Jazz?African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, Eric Porter

Douglass’ Women, Jewell Parker Rhodes
Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey, Rachel Simon
Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River, Velma WallisEditor Award: Max Rodriguez, QBR: The Black Book Review (www.qbr.com)

2002

The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990 - 2000, Al Young
Reading the Funnies: Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout The First Half of the Twentieth Century, Donald Phelps
Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler

Lipstick and Other Stories, Alex Kuo

Shell Shaker, Lee Ann Howe

Interrogations at Noon, Dana Gioia

Homeless at Home, Gloria Frym

The Living Blood, Tananarive Due

Fire in Beulah, Rilla Askew

The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, Susanne Antonetta

Colcha, Aaron A. Abeyta

Lifetime Achievement: Lerone Bennett, Jr. - Jack Hirschman

Children's Literature: Jessel Miller Angels in the Vineyards

2001

Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories; The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949, Amanda J. Cobb
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, Andrea Dworkin
When Living Was a Labor Camp, Diana García
Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999, Sandra M. Gilbert
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnson

Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, Russell Charles Leong
The Island of Lost Luggage, Janet McAdams
Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez
Killing Time with Strangers, W.S. Penn
Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir, Cheri Register
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire, Carolyne Wright
Editor/Publisher Award: Malcolm Margolin
Lifetime Achievement: Ted Joans; Tillie Olsen; Philip Whalen

2000

From the Belly of My Beauty, Esther G. Belin
Sing When the Spirit Says Sing: Selected & New Poems 1960-1990, Jon Eckels
Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective, Emil Guillermo
Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child, Elva Treviño Hart

It's Not Nostalgia: Poetry and Prose, Michael Lally
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, Michael Patrick MacDonald

The Ice Wosrkers Sings and Other Poem, Andrés Montoya
Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood, Kate Moses and Camille Peri, editors

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janisse Ray
Italian American: The Racializing of an Ethnic Identity, David A.J. Richards
Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford

Why She Left Us, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, Allan J. Ryan

Year in Nam: A Native American Soldier's Story, Leroy TeCube
Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times, Helen Thomas