The Before Columbus Foundation recently announced the winners of the 46th annual American Book Awards. The prestigious honor was established to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. With no categories and no nominees, the American Book Awards aim to recognize literary excellence without limits or restrictions.
This year, 15 works of fiction authored or edited by 19 writers and poets were awarded an American Book Award. Among this year’s cohort of award-winners are three scholars from Black or African American backgrounds who currently hold faculty appointments at American-based institutions.
Amy Alvarez, associate professor of practice in the Messina College at Boston College, won for her poetry collection, Makeshift Altar: Poems (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). In her collection, Alvarez weaves together themes of environment, family, and migration, as well as her own ancestry as a Black Latinx woman, to showcase the meaning of home and existence and the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American.
Before joining the Boston College faculty in 2024, Alvarz taught at West Virginia University for eight years. Earlier, she was a lead English teacher at Boston Day and Evening Academy. In addition to Makeshift Altar, she is a co-author of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Alvarez holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, a master’s degree in English education from the City College of New York, and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine.
Percival Everett, distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, won for his novel, James (Doubleday, 2024), a re-imagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told through the enslaved Jim’s point of view. The novel has won numerous prestigious awards, including the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
Professor Everett has taught creative writing at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences since 1998. He is the author of more than 30 works of fiction, including Telephone (Graywolf Press, 2020), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021. His novel, Erasure (Graywolf Press, 2001), was the inspiration for the film American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2023. Professor Everett received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Miami and his master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Danzy Senna, professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, won for her novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024). Described as a dark comedy, the book follows a novelist-turned-television writer living in Los Angeles, covering themes of love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex.
Born to African American and Anglo-Irish parents, Senna focuses her writing on multiracial and complex social identities. Her first novel, Caucasia (Riverhead Books, 1998), has been translated into 12 languages and has become required reading for several English and African American college courses. A native of Boston, Senna holds a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Stanford University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
In addition to the American Book Awards, the Before Columbus Foundation issued special citations to two Black scholars currently affiliated with Ivy League universities.
John Edgar Wideman, professor emeritus of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University, received the foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of nearly 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, including the forthcoming Languages of Home: Essays on Writing, Hoop, and American Lives 1975-2025 (Scribner, 2025). Among his many accomplishments include becoming the second African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Wyoming, and his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American studies department.
Erroll McDonald, a faculty member with Columbia University and vice president and executive editor of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group of Penguin Random House, received the Editor/Publisher Award. A former PEN America trustee, he recently stepped down from his role as chair of the board of the Center for Fiction following seven years of service. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and an MBA from Columbia University.
