American Book Awards

About the American Book Awards

Every book the Before Columbus Foundation honored, 2006-2025. The award has no categories, nominees or shortlist, so every row is category Book, level Winner. Year is the announcement year. Sources are the Foundation's own press releases and programs (PDFs and images on beforecolumbusfoundation.com) for 2006, 2008-2014, 2016-2021 and 2024-2025. Fallback to Wikipedia's American Book Awards list for 2007 (the Foundation's poster names only the winners, matching Wikipedia's list), 2015, 2022 and 2023 (no Foundation release online; web.archive.org was unreachable). Lifetime achievement, editor/publisher, oral literature and anti-censorship honors for people, journals or presses are skipped. Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Awards and the 2021 Anti-Censorship Award are included when the release names a book (2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025). Edited works list the work's author where the release names one (Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Jean Racine, Lorenzo Thomas, Jose Antonio Burciaga); otherwise the editors. The 2019 Vollmann honor covers both volumes of Carbon Ideologies and is one row. Titles lightly normalized from the releases (typos such as Each Moth I Sing, Victor Lavalle and The Big Machine fixed).

Organization: Before Columbus Foundation. Years are award years, which can differ from publication years. Official site (opens in a new tab)