2021 Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
The Atlantic staff writer and poet Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation.
Beginning in his hometown of New
Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks — those that are honest about the past and those that are not — that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is
the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting
exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view — whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought to life by
the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Every year, the National Book Critics Circle of over 700 book reviewers from all parts of the country present awards for the finest books published in English. Categories include: Fiction, General Nonfiction, Biography/Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism.
Prizes
The 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards
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Raven Leilani, Cathy Park Hong and Maggie O’Farrell are among the seven winners of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards, announced Thursday during a virtual awards ceremony by the organization of American book critics.
Hong won the prize in autobiography for “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” a book that weaves memoir, history and cultural criticism into an exploration of Asian American identity.
During an emotional acceptance speech, Hong read the names of the eight victims who were killed at three Atlanta-area spas last week.
“This award is also in memory of the women who died in Atlanta,” she said. “This is for their families and this is for all of the Asian women, the women in the sex industry, in the service industry, the migrant workers, the factory workers, the mothers and daughters who have come from homelands riven by empire, who have labored and struggled and died in the shadows of American history. Your hardship and spirit will not be in vain. We will remember you. We will fight for you. Your lives are not expendable. You will be remembered.”
Leilani took home the John Leonard Prize for a first book for her novel “Luster,” about a Black woman in her 20s trying to make sense of her life among the privileged in New York. The judges called it “a tremendous achievement” whose “tender and raucous prose mirrors the narrator’s tender and raucous self.”
“For me, this craft and the community I’ve made around it have given my life shape and purpose,” said Leilani during her acceptance speech, dedicating the honor to all of her teachers.
“At every stage of life I’ve had a teacher who saw me, who met me where I was and who made me feel capable and specific,” she said. “...This book wouldn’t exist without them.”
O’Farrell received the fiction award for “Hamnet,” a historical work based on the life of Shakesepeare, about a famous playwright and his wife who lose their son to the bubonic plague.
The poetry prize went to Francine J. Harris for “Here Is the Sweet Hand,” a poetry collection that explores female loneliness, blackness, queerness, pop culture and society at large. In the biography category, Amy Stanley won for “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World,” an immersive history focused on an unconventional woman in 19th-century Edo, the city that would become Tokyo.
Tom Zoellner won the nonfiction prize for “Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire,” a riveting account of a Jamaican slave rebellion that led to the British abolition of slavery. In criticism, Nicole Fleetwood won for “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” which documents the creative lives of currently and formerly incarcerated artists.
Jo Livingstone and the longtime nonprofit Feminist Press were also honored during the public event as recipients of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing andthe Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, respectively.
This year’s live virtual ceremony comes at a time when the National Book Critics Circle is recovering from a tumultuous summer that almost destroyed the 47-year-old organization. Former President Laurie Hertzel and five board members resigned in June amid competing allegations of racism and privacy violations. Last August, NBCC members voted to allow board member Carlin Romano, who was at the center of the controversy, to finish his term.
Here is the complete list of 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists announced in January:
Autobiography
Cathy Park Hong, “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning”
Shayla Lawson, “This Is
Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope”
Riva Lehrer, “Golem Girl”
Wayétu Moore, “The Dragons, The Giant, The Women”
Alia Volz, “Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco”
Biography
Amy Stanley, “Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World”
Zachary D. Carter, “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard
Keynes”
Heather Clark, “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath”
Les Payne, Tamara Payne, “The Dead Are Arising:
The Life of Malcolm X”
Maggie Doherty, “The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s”
Criticism
Nicole Fleetwood, “Marking
Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration”
Namwali Serpell, “Stranger Faces”
Cristina Rivera Garza, “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country”
Vivian Gornick, “Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader”
Wendy A. Woloson,
“Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America”
Fiction
Martin Amis, “Inside Story”
Randall Kenan, “If I Had Two Wings”
Maggie O’Farrell,
“Hamnet”
Souvankham Thammavongsa, “How to Pronounce Knife”
Bryan Washington, “Memorial”
Nonfiction
Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of
America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States”
James Shapiro, “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future”
Sarah Smarsh, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs”
Isabel Wilkerson,
“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”
Tom Zoellner, “Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire”
Poetry
Victoria Chang, “Obit”
Francine J. Harris,
“Here Is The Sweet Hand”
Amaud Jamaul Johnson, “Imperial Liquor”
Chris Nealon, “The Shore”
Danez Smith, “Homie”
John Leonard Prize
Kerri Arsenault, “Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains”
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “The Undocumented Americans”
Raven Leilani,
“Luster”
Megha Majumdar, “A Burning”
Douglas Stuart, “Shuggie Bain”
Brandon Taylor, “Real Life”
C Pam Zhang,
“How Much of These Hills Is Gold”