The winners of the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have been revealed, the annual literary prizes given to honor “literature that contributes to our understanding of race and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.”
The fiction prize went to Carrie R. Moore for Make Your Way Home, a story collection about Black characters in the American South searching for love and kinship. The book was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN America Open Book Award, and Story Prize, and Moore was recently named a member of the National Book Foundation’s latest 5 Under 35 cohort.
Bench Ansfield won the nonfiction prize for Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of an American City, which tells the story of the wave of arson-for-hire that plagued U.S. cities in the 1970s. The book previously won the New York City Book Award and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.
Winning in the memoir category was Sarah Aziza for The Hollow Half, which won the Palestine Book Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, while Gbenga Adesina took home the poetry award for Death Does Not End at the Sea, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and PEN/Voelcker Award.
Natasha Trethewey, the chair of the jury for the prizes, said, “It is never easy to choose a single work in each genre from so many excellent books published each year. That each of this year’s winners is a debut makes the honor all the more profound—new voices, already essential. These books matter because they deepen our understanding, enlarge our empathy, and remind us of literature’s power to illuminate who we are.”
The historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of books including The History of White People and Old in Art School, was honored with a lifetime achievement award for “her transformative role in reshaping how we understand history, race, and identity in America.”
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, presented by the Cleveland Foundation, were founded in 1935. Previous winners include Toni Morrison for Beloved, Colson Whitehead for John Henry Days, and Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
