The Cleveland Foundation announced the winners of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, given annually to books “that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.”
The winner of the fiction prize was Danzy Senna for Colored Television, her darkly comic novel about a novelist working on a television series with a hotshot producer. The novel, which received a starred review from Kirkus, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
The nonfiction award went to The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots, written by John Swanson Jacobs and edited by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder. Jacobs, a 19th-century abolitionist, was originally published in an Australian newspaper in 1855 and was rediscovered and republished in book form last year.
Winning in the memoir category was Tessa Hulls for Feeding Ghosts, a Kirkus Prize finalist and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. It is the first time a graphic memoir has won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Janice N. Harrington won the poetry prize for Yard Show, and poet Yusef Komunyakaa was honored with the lifetime achievement award.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were established in 1935. Previous winners include Toni Morrison for Beloved, Taylor Branch for Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, and Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
