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

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

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

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

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!

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
• Julia Vinograd for The Book of Jerusalem
• William Oandasan for Round Valley Songs

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

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

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
• Benjamin Hoff for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley[2]
• 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

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 and 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

1990

• Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
• Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
• Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)
• 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: The Autobiography
• 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

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

1992

• A'Lelia Perry Bundles for Madam C.J. Walker
• Art Spiegelman for The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz 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
• José 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

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

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

1995

• Abraham Rodriguez for Spidertown, a novel
• Herb Boyd, Robert L. Allen for Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology
• Denise Chávez 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

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

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 Gómez-Peña for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
• Louis Owens for Nightland
• Martín 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

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

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
• Chiori Santiago, author, Judith Lowry, illustrator, Home to Medicine Mountain[6]

2000

• Esther G. Belin for From the Belly of My Beauty
• 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
• Editor/Publisher: Ronald Sukenick[6]
• Jack E. White,[6] Journalism
• Frank Chin,[6] Lifetime Achievement
• Robert Creeley,[6] Lifetime Achievement

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
• Malcolm Margolin,[6] Editor
• Ted Joans,[6] Lifetime Achievement
• Tillie Olsen,[6] Lifetime Achievement
• Philip Whalen[6] Lifetime Achievement

2002[7]

• Aaron A. Abeyta, Colcha
• Susanne Antonetta, The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
• Rilla Askew, Fire in Beulah
• Tananarive Due, The Living Blood
• Gloria Frym, Homeless at Home
• Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon
• LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker
• Alex Kuo, Lipstick and Other Stories
• Michael N. Nagler, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
• Donald Phelps, Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
• Al Young, The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990–2000
• Jessel Miller, Angels in the Vineyards
• Lerone Bennett, Lifetime Achievement
• Jack Hirschman, Lifetime Achievement

2003[7]

• Kevin Baker, Paradise Alley
• Debra Magpie Earling, Perma Red
• Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
• Rick Heide, ed., Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
• Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga, Vera Metcalf, and Lars Krutak, eds, Akuzilleput Igaqullghet, Our Words Put to Paper: Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
• Alejandro Murguía, This War Called Love: Nine Stories
• Jack Newfield, The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
• Joseph Papaleo, Italian Stories
• Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
• Jewell Parker Rhodes, Douglass' Women, a novel
• Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
• Velma Wallis, Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
• Max Rodriguez, QBR: The Black Book Review

2004[7]

• Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent, a novel
• David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
• Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
• Kristin Hunter Lattany, Breaking Away
• A. Robert Lee, Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
• Diane Sher Lutovich, What I Stole
• Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation
• Renato Rosaldo, Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Arana
• Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
• Michael Walsh, And All the Saints

2005[7]

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

2006[7]

• MacKenzie Bezos, The Testing of Luther Albright, a novel
• Matt Briggs, Shoot the Buffalo
• David P. Diaz, The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second-Generation Mexican-American
• Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
• Thomas Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
• Tim Z. Hernandez, Skin Tax
• Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
• P. Lewis, Nate
• Peter Metcalfe, Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
• Kevin J. Mullen, The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
• Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, eds., A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
• Matthew Shenoda, Somewhere Else
• Carlton T. Spiller, Scalding Heart
• Chris Hamilton-Emery, Editor
• Jay Wright, Lifetime Achievement

2007

• Daniel Cassidy, How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
• Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
• Rigoberto González, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
• Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains, a novel
• Ernestine Hayes, Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
• Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans
• Gary Panter, Jimbo's Inferno
• Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown
• Judith Roche, Wisdom of the Body
• Kali VanBaale, The Space Between

2008[6]

• 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
• Jonathan Curiel, Al’ America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots
• Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black. 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, a novel
• 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, Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition, ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen
• Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
• J. J. Phillips, Lifetime Achievement

2009

• 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: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, eds Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón
• 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: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
• Miguel Algarín, Lifetime Achievement

2010[6]

• 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
• Victor LaValle, The Big Machine
• François Mandeville, This Is What They Say, translated by Ron Scollon from Chipewyan
• Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls
• Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
• Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Poems for the Millennium: Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
• Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems
• Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems
• Katha Politt, Lifetime Achievement
• Quincy Troupe, Lifetime Achievement

2011[8]

• Keith Gilyard, John Oliver Killens
• Akbar Ahmed, Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam
• Camille Dungy, Suck on the Marrow
• Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel
• William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and Classical Tradition
• Gerald Vizenor, Shrouds of White Earth
• Eric Gansworth, Extra Indians
• Ivan Argüelles, The Death of Stalin
• Geoffrey Alan Argent, ed., The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 1: The Fratricides, translated by Argent from French
• Neela Vaswani, You Have Given Me a Country
• Sasha Pimentel Chacón, Insides She Swallowed
• Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History of Culture in the United States
• Carmen Giménez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds
• Luis Valdez, Lifetime Achievement
• John A. Williams, Lifetime Achievement

2012[6]

• Annia Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
• Arlene Kim, What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?
• Ed Bok Lee, Whorled
• Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes
• Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• Shann Ray, American Masculine
• Alice Rearden, translator; Ann Fienup-Riordan, ed., Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput: Our Nelson Island Stories
• Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now
• Amy Waldman, The Submission
• Mary Winegarden, The Translator's Sister
• Kevin Young, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
• Eugene B. Redmond, Lifetime Achievement

2013[9]

• Will Alexander, Singing In Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose, Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture, Essay Press
• Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, Cargo
• Philip P. Choy, San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide To Its History & Architecture, City Lights
• Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist, Harper Collins
• Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was An Aztec, Copper Canyon Press
• Louise Erdrich, The Round House, Harper Collins
• Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence, University of Chicago
• Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet, Aunt Lute Books
• Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir, W.W. Norton & Co.
• Demetria Martinez, The Block Captain's Daughter, University of Oklahoma Press
• Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Blood Songs, The Ecstatic Exchange
• dg nanouk okpik, Corpse Whale, University of Arizona Press
• Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War On Student Radical and Reagan's Rise to Power, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Christopher B. Teuton, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liar's Club, University of North Carolina
• Lew Welch, Ring of Bone: Collected Poems, City Lights
• Ivan Argüelles, Lifetime Achievement
• Greil Marcus, Lifetime Achievement
• Floyd Salas, Lifetime Achievement

2014[10]

• Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, Metropolitan Books
• Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire; The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, University of California Press
• Juan Delgado (poetry) and Thomas McGovern (photography), Vital Signs, Heyday Books
• Alex Espinoza, The Five Acts of Diego León, Random House[11]
• Jonathan Scott Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940, University of North Carolina Press
• Joan Naviyuk Kane, Hyperboreal, University of Pittsburgh Press
• Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Tanya Olson, Boyishly, YesYes Books
• Sterling D. Plumpp, Home/Bass, Third World Press
• Emily Raboteau, Searching For Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Atlantic Monthly Press
• Jerome Rothenberg with Heriberto Yepez, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, Commonwealth Books
• Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Metropolitan Books
• Margaret Wrinkle, Wash, Atlantic Monthly Press
• Koon Woon, Water Chasing Water, Kaya Press
• Armond White, Anti-Censorship Award
• Michael Parenti, Lifetime Achievement

2015[12]

• Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Vintage)
• Arlene Biala, her beckoning hands (Word Poetry)
• Arthur Dong, Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970 (DeepFocus Productions)
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon Press)
• Peter J. Harris, The Black Man of Happiness (Black Man of Happiness Project)
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
• Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster)
• Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account (Pantheon)
• Manuel Luis Martinez, Los Duros (Floricanto Press)
• Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn)
• Carlos Santana with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (Little, Brown and Company)
• Ira Sukrungruang, Southside Buddhist (University of Tampa Press)
• Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Henry Holt)
• Anne Waldman, Lifetime Achievement

2016[13]

• Laura Da', Tributaries (University of Arizona)
• Susan Muaddi Darraj, Curious Land: Stories from Home (University of Massachusetts)
• Deepa Iyer, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multicultural Future (The New Press)
• Mat Johnson, Loving Day (Spiegel & Grau)
• John Keene, Counternarratives (New Directions)
• William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University)
• Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint)
• Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Lawrence Hill Books)
• Jesús Salvador Treviño, Return to Arroyo Grande (Arte Público)
• Nick Turse, Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (Haymarket Books)
• Ray Young Bear, Manifestation Wolverine: The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear (Open Road Integrated Media)
• Louise Meriwether, Lifetime Achievement
• Lyra Monteiro and Nancy Isenberg, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
• Chiitaanibah Johnson, Andrew Hope Award

2017[14]

• Rabia Chaudry Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial (St. Martin's Press)
• Flores A. Forbes Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Skyhorse Publishing)
• Yaa Gyasi Homegoing (Knopf)
• Holly Hughes Passings (Expedition Press)
• Randa Jarrar Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Sarabande Books)
• Bernice L. McFadden The Book of Harlan (Akashic Books)
• Brian D. McInnes Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow (Michigan State University Press)
• Patrick Phillips Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Vaughn Rasberry Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press)
• Marc Anthony Richardson Year of the Rat (Fiction Collective Two)
• Shawna Yang Ryan Green Island (Knopf)
• Ruth Sergel See You in the Streets: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (University of Iowa Press)
• Solmaz Sharif Look (Graywolf Press)
• Adam Soldofsky Memory Foam (Disorder Press)
• Alfredo Véa The Mexican Flyboy (University of Oklahoma Press)
• Dean Wong Seeing the Light: Four Decades in Chinatown (Chin Music Press)
• Nancy Mercado Lifetime Achievement
• Ammiel Alcalay Editor/Publisher Award: Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative

2018 [15]

• Thi Bui The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Harry N. Abrams)
• Rachelle Cruz God's Will for Monsters (Inlandia Books)
• Tommy Curry The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press)
• Tongo Eisen-Martin Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights)
• Dana Naone Hall Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer (University of Hawaii)
• Kelly Lytle Hernández City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (University of North Carolina)
• Victor LaValle The Changeling: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau)
• Bojan Louis Currents (BkMk Press)
• Valeria Luiselli Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press)
• Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B. V. Olguín Altermundos Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press)
• Tiya Miles The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press)
• Tommy Pico Nature Poem (Tin House Books)
• Rena Priest Patriarchy Blues (MoonPath Press)
• Joseph Rios Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations (Omnidawn)
• Sunaura Taylor Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press)
• Sequoyah Guess Lifetime Achievement
• Kellie Jones South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke University Press): Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
• Charles F. Harris Editor/Publisher Award
• Rob Rogers Anti-Censorship Award
• Heroes Are Gang Leaders Oral Literature Award

2019 [16]

• Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press)
• May-lee Chai Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories (Blair)
• Louise DeSalvo The House of Early Sorrows: A Memoir in Essays (Fordham University Press)
• Heid E. Erdrich New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press)
• Ángel García Teeth Never Sleep: Poems (University of Arkansas Press)
• Tommy Orange There There (Knopf)
• Halifu Osumare Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir (University Press of Florida)
• Christopher Patton Unlikeness Is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book (Gaspereau Press)
• Mark Sarvas Memento Park: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Jeffrey C. Stewart The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press)
• William T. Vollmann Carbon Ideologies: Volume I, No Immediate Danger, Volume II, No Good Alternative (Viking Press|Viking)
• G. Willow Wilson and Nico Leon Ms. Marvel Vol. 9: Teenage Wasteland (Marvel Comics)
• Nathan Hare Lifetime Achievement Award
• UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Editor/Publisher Award
• Moor Mother Oral Literature Award

2020[17]

• Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon: Poems (W.W. Norton)
• Sara Borjas, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press)
• Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, Tate Swindell, editors, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (City Lights)
• Staceyann Chin, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (Haymarket)
• Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina: Stories (One World)
• Tara Fickle, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (New York University Press)
• Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (Basic Books)
• Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (Pantheon)
• Jake Skeets, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions)
• George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker, They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf Productions)
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin)
• De'Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills (Bloomsbury Publishing)
• Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, Solitary: My Story of Transformation and Hope (Grove Press)
• Lifetime Achievement: Eleanor W. Traylor
• Editor Award: The Panopticon Review, Kofi Natambu, editor
• Publisher Award: Commune Editions, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr, editors
• Oral Literature Award: Amalia Leticia Ortiz
• Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

2021[18]

• Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.)
• Maisy Card, These Ghosts Are Family (Simon & Schuster)
• Anthony Cody, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn Press)
• Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (Counterpoint)
• Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press)
• Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin Press)
• John Giorno, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World)
• Randall Horton, {#289-128}: Poems (University of Kentucky)
• Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (Monthly Review Press)
• Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (Simon & Schuster)
• Judy Juanita, Manhattan my ass, you’re in Oakland (Equidistance Press)
• William Melvin Kelley (author), Aiki Kelley (illustrator), Dunfords Travels Everywheres (Anchor Books)
• Lifetime Achievement: Maryemma Graham
• Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award: Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, by Shana Redmond
• Anti-Censorship Award: Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, by Jacob Soboroff

2022[19]

• Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Viking)
• Esther G. Belin, Jeff Burgland, Connie A. Jacobs, Anthony K. Webster, editors, The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature (University of Arizona Press)
• Emma Brodie, Songs in Ursa Major (Knopf)
• Daphne Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press)
• Myriam J. A. Chancy, What Storm, What Thunder (Tin House Books)
• Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy (Grove Press)
• Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl: A Novel (Atria Books)
• Fatima Shaik, Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood (The Historic New Orleans Collection)
• Edwin Torres, Quanundrum: [i will be your many angled thing] (Roof Books)
• Truong Tran, Book of the Other: Small in Comparison (Kaya Press)
• Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press)
• Phillip B. Williams, Mutiny (Penguin Books)
• Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart: A Memoir (Knopf)
• Lifetime Achievement: Gayl Jones
• Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award: Sound Recording Technology and American Literature, by Jessica E. Teague
• Anti-Censorship Award: Jeffrey St. Clair
• Editor/Publisher Award: Wave Books: Charlie Wright (Publisher) / Joshua Beckman (Editor in Chief)