Rebecca Nagle and Kathleen DuVal are the winners of the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, given annually to works of nonfiction that exemplify “literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern.”
Nagle won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, about the Muscogee people’s fight for sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, “gripping, infuriating, and illuminating—a valuable corrective to our national ignorance.”
The finalist for the Lukas Book Prize was Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans’ The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels.
DuVal was named the winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, which explores the power of the Indigenous nations in North America before and after European colonization. The book also received a starred review from Kirkus, with a critic calling it “a revelatory account of the power and influence of Indigenous peoples in North America.”
Named finalists for the Lynton Prize were Edda L. Fields-Black for COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War and Seth Rockman for Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.
The Lukas Prizes were established in 1998 and are administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Previous winners include Gary Younge for Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Livesand Ned Blackhawk for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
