American Book Awards

The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. This should not be confused with the National Book Awards which operated under the same nomenclature, American Book Award, between 1980 and 1986 when both organizations gave out different awards under the same name.

1980s

 * 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
 * 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
 * Opal Whiteley for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley
 * 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 & 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

1990s

 * 1990
 * Adrienne Kennedy for People Who Led to My Plays
 * Barbara Grizzuti Harrison for Italian Days
 * 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
 * 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
 * Daniela Gioseffi for Women on War (Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age)


 * 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 Saenz 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
 * Jose 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 Chavez 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 Gomez-Pena for The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
 * Louis Owens for Nightland
 * Martin 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

2000s

 * 2000
 * 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


 * 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


 * 2002
 * Aaron Abeyta for Colcha
 * Al Young for The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000
 * Alex Kuo for Lipstick and Other Stories
 * Dana Gioia for Interrogations at Noon
 * Donald Phelps for Reading the Funnies : Looking at Great Cartoonists Throughout the First Half of the 20th Century
 * Gloria Frym for Homeless at Home
 * Jack Hirschman for Front Lines
 * Jessel Miller for Angels in the Vineyards
 * LeAnne Howe for Shell Shaker
 * Lerone Bennett for Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
 * Michael N. Nagler for Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future
 * Rilla Askew for Fire in Beulah
 * Susanne Antonetta for Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
 * Tananarive Due for The Living Blood


 * 2003
 * Alejandro Murguía for This War Called Love
 * Daniel Ellsberg for Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
 * Debra Magpie Earling for Perma Red
 * Eric Porter for What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists
 * Igor Krupnik for Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History
 * Jack Newfield for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania
 * Jewell Parker Rhodes for Douglass' Women : A Novel
 * Joseph Papaleo for Italian Stories
 * Kevin Baker for Paradise Alley
 * Rachel Simon for Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey
 * Rick Heide for Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California
 * Velma Wallis for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River


 * 2004
 * A. Robert Lee for Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions
 * Charisse Jones, Kumea Shorter-Gooden for Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
 * David Cole for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
 * Diana Abu-Jaber for Crescent: A Novel
 * Diane Sher Lutovich for What I Stole
 * Kristin Hunter Lattany for Breaking Away
 * Michael Walsh for And All the Saints
 * Renato Rosaldo for Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la Mujer Araa
 * Ruth L. Ozeki for All Over Creation
 * Scott Saul for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties


 * 2005
 * Alisha S. Drabek for The Red Cedar of Afognak, A Driftwood Journey
 * Bernard W. Bell for The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots And Modern Literary Branches
 * Don Lee for Country of Origin: A Novel
 * Don West, Jeff Biggers, George Brosi for No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems
 * Hiroshi Kashiwagi for Swimming in the American: A Memoir And Selected Writings
 * Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc for Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
 * Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
 * Julie Chibbaro for Redemption
 * Lamont B. Steptoe for A Long Movie of Shadows
 * Ralph M. Flores for The Horse in the Kitchen: Stories of a Mexican-American Family
 * Richard A. Clarke for Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
 * Cecelie Berry for Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood


 * 2006
 * Carlton T. Spiller for Scalding Heart
 * Darryl Dickson-Carr for The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction
 * David P. Diaz for The White Tortilla: Reflections of a Second -Generation Mexican - American
 * Doris Seale for A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children
 * Jay Wright for Transfigurations: Collected Poems
 * Josh Kun for Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
 * Kevin J. Mullen for The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
 * Mackenzie Bezos for The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel
 * Matt Briggs for Shoot the Buffalo
 * Matthew Shenoda for Somewhere Else
 * P. Lewis for Nate
 * Peter Metcalfe for Gumboot Determination: The Story of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
 * Thomas Ferraro for Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
 * Tim Z. Hernandez for Skin Tax


 * 2007
 * Daniel Cassidy for How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
 * Ernestine Hayes for Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir
 * Gary Panter for Jimbo's Inferno
 * Jeffrey F. L. Partridge for Beyond Literary Chinatown
 * Judith Roche for Wisdom of the Body
 * Kali Vanbaale for The Space Between
 * Michael Eric Dyson for Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
 * Patricia Klindienst for The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America
 * Reyna Grande for Across a Hundred Mountains: A Novel
 * Rigoberto Gonzalez for Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa


 * 2008
 * Moustafa Bayoumi for How Does It Feel to Be a Problem Being Young and Arab in America
 * Douglas A. Blackmon for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
 * Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, Lydia T. Black, and Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
 * Maria Mazziotti Gillan for All That Lies Between Us
 * Nikki Giovanni for The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998
 * C. S. Giscombe for Prairie Style
 * Angela Jackson for Where I Must Go: A Novel
 * L. Luis Lopez for Each Month I Sing
 * Tom Lutz for Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
 * Fae Myenne Ng for Steer Toward Rock
 * Yuko Taniguchi for The Ocean in the Closet
 * Lorenzo Thomas, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, editor for Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
 * Frank B. Wilderson III for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid
 * Jonathan Curiel for Al’ America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots
 * J.J. Phillips, Author of Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (Lifetime Achievement Award)


 * 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, edited by 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, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian
 * Miguel Algarín, Lifetime Achievement Award


 * 2010
 * 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, Big Machine
 * François Mandeville, This Is What They Say (translated from the Chipewyan by Ron Scollon)
 * Bich Minh Nguyen, Short Girls
 * Robin D.G. Kelley, Franklin Rosemont, Black,Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
 * Jerome Rothenberg, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Poems for the Millennium
 * Kathryn Waddell Takara, Pacific Raven: Hawai`i Poems
 * Pamela Uschuk, Crazy Love: New Poems
 * Katha Politt, Antarctic Traveller (Lifetime Achievement Award)
 * Quincy Troupe, The Architecture of Language (Lifetime Achievement Award)

Referencces

 * List of Past Winners
 * American Book Awards at lovethebook