Books

• Vincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt," Nonfiction
• Victoria Chang, "Obit," Poetry
• Samuel R. Delany, Lifetime Achievement
• James McBride, "Deacon King Kong," Fiction
• Natasha Trethewey, "Memorial Drive," Nonfiction

McBride becomes a two-time winner.

The Anisfield-Wolf winners will be honored this fall during the sixth annual Cleveland Book Week.

All five members of the Anisfield-Wolf jury — chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, historian Simon Schama and psychologist Steven Pinker — salute the new class in the video below. 

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Samuel R. Delany is a pioneer of gay literature and a science fiction icon, as comfortable at academic conferences as he is at comic book conventions. Born in New York City, Delany had won four Nebula Awards and a Hugo prize by the time he was 27. His gifts as a novelist and critic put him on the creative writing faculties of the University of Massachusetts and Temple University. The Lambda Literary Report named him one of the 50 most important people in changing the culture’s view of gayness over a half century. His books include the novels “Babel-17,” “The Einstein Intersection,” “Dhalgren” and the memoir “The Motion of Light in Water.” 

NONFICTION 

Vincent Brown is an innovative scholar who combines impeccable historical research with mapping and visual tools. He is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. “Tacky’s Revolt” is a groundbreaking investigation into the roots, combatants, cartography and reverberations of the largest slave revolt in the 18th Century British Atlantic world. 

POETRY

Victoria Chang is a celebrated poet, children’s book author and professor who grew up in Detroit and now lives with her family in Los Angeles. Restless in the financial sector, Chang earned an MFA at Warren Wilson College and now serves on Antioch University’s faculty. In “Obit,” she distilled her grief after her mother died into a series of prose poems, structured like obituaries, for all she had lost in the world. 

FICTION

James McBride is the first Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction winner, for “The Color of Water,” to be honored in fiction. A celebrated novelist, musician, composer, Spike Lee collaborator and a National Humanities Medalist, McBride was praised by Barack Obama for “displaying the character of the American family.” A fictionalized version of his parents’ Baptist church in Brooklyn, N.Y., anchors and animates “Deacon King Kong,” a rollicking tale set spinning in 1969 when an elderly, alcoholic deacon shoots off the ear of a notorious drug dealer. 

NONFICTION

Natasha Trethewey is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and a 2007 Pulitzer winner for “Native Guard.” Trethewey wrote “Memorial Drive” to reclaim her mother, born Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, from becoming a footnote to her daughter’s more prominent story. Born in Mississippi on Confederate Memorial Day to a Black mother and a white father, the poet explores how she embodies some of the Civil War’s persistent contradictions. “Memorial Drive” investigates the life and death of Turnbough, killed when her daughter was 19 by a man she had divorced.