The Before Columbus Foundation announces
Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual
AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
Sunday, December 28, 4:00 – 6:30 P.M.
Oakland, CA — The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2008 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, December 28th at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way in Berkeley, CA. The awards will take place from 4 P.M. – 6:30 P.M.
Authors attending will read selections from their works and sign copies of their award-winning books. A reception and book signing will take place following the ceremony. This event is free to the public. For more information, call (510) 681-5652.
California Poet Laureate Al Young will host the event. Al Young was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger, who has said of Mr. Young, “Al Young is a poet, an educator and a man with a passion for the arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration.
The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.
2008 American Book Award Winners:
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press)
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday)
Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka/Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804 (University of Washington Press)
Maria Mazziotti Gillian, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions Inc.)
Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins)
C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press)
Angela Jackson, Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly)
L. Luis Lopez, Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press)
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion)
Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press)
Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press)
Maria Mazziotti Gillan recently donated her papers to the Binghamton University Archives. Her collection represents a multimedia of richly diverse literary materials spanning decades. This collection includes her personal journals from 1954 to 2007; drafts of poems and stories from 1957 to the present; DVDs, CDs and audio tapes of program interviews; and 40 years of correspondence and photographs of will-known poets, fiction writers, editors and scholars.