Debut Fiction | Judges: Amina Gautier, Ron A. Austin and Preston Allen 

• Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Finding La Negrita by  Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (Jaded Ibis Press)

Speculative Fiction | Judge: B. Sharise Moore

• The Last Dreamwalker by  Rita Woods (Macmillan)
• Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi (Macmillan)

General Fiction | Judges: Morgan Christie, Lauren Francis-Sharma and Kim McLarin

• Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Berkley)
• The Islands by Dionne Irving (Catapult)
• People Person by Candice Carty-Williams (Simon & Schuster)
• Mother Country, Jacinda Townsend (Graywolf Press)

Historical Nonfiction | Judges: Gerald Horne and Ron Stodghill

• Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture by Robert O’Meally (Columbia University Press)
• We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power by Caleb Gayle, (Riverhead Books)
• Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James (Columbia University Press)

Memoir Nonfiction | Judges: Laurie Jean Carter and Sheri Booker

• This Boy We Made,Taylor Harris,  (Catapult)
• Black Boy Smile, D. Watkins, (Legacy Lit)
• Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery , Harrison Mooney, (Steerforth Press)

 Poetry | Judges: Asiya Wadud, Brian Gilmore and Chanda Feldman

• Best Barbarian, Roger Reeves (W.W. Norton)
• To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf)
• Null Landing, Isaiah A. Hines (Slope Editions)
• Plans for Sentences, Renee Gladman (Wave Books)
• We Are Not Wearing Helmets, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Debut Fiction:

• Young Blood, Sifiso Mzobe (Catalyst Press)
• The Final Revival of Opal and Nev, Dawnie Walton (37 Ink)

Fiction:

• Nazaré, J.J. Amaworo Wilson (PM Press)
• Yellow Wife, Sadeqa Johnson (Simon & Schuster)
• The Perishing, Natashia Deon (Counterpoint)
• Rib King, Ladee Hubbard (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins)
• Reconstruction: Stories, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Small Beer Press)

NonFiction (Memoir/Biography):

• Bird Uncaged, Marlon Peterson (Bold Type Books)
• Read Until You Understand, Farah Jasmine Griffin (W. W. Norton & Company)

NonFiction (Historical/Social/Political):

• We Do This Till We Free Us, Mariame Kaba (Haymarket Books)
• Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, Daphne A. Brooks (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press)

Poetry:

• Tragic City, Clemonce Heard (Anhinga Press)
• More Perfect Union, Teri Ellen Cross Davis (Mad Creek Books)
• Sho, Douglas Kearney (Wave Books)
• I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love, Mahogany L. Browne (Haymarket Books)
• Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
•  

Debut Fiction:

• The Coyotes of Carthage, Steven Wright (Ecco)
• Black Sunday, Tola Rotimi Abraham (Catapult)

Fiction:

• Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tor)
• The Freedom Artist, Ben Okri (Akashic Books)
• These Bodies, Morgan Christie (Tolsun Books)
• Book of the Little Axe, Lauren Francis-Sharma (Grove Press)
• Black Bottom Saints, Alice Randall (Amistad Books)

NonFiction:

• Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Vincent Brown (Belknap Press)
• The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask (St. Martin’s Press)
• Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, Ijeoma Oluo (Seal Press)
• The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, Ainissa Ramirez (The MIT Press)
• Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Natasha Trethewey (Ecco)

Poetry:

• Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount (Four Way Books)
• Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Jump the Clock, Erica Hunt (Nightboat Books)
• Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo (Four Way Books)
• White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande Books)

Debut Fiction:

• Avery Colt is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, Ron A. Austin (Southeast Missouri State University Press)
• As a River, Sion Dayson (Jaded Ibis Press)

Fiction:

• Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead Books)
• The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott (Liveright)

• Speaking of Summer, Kalisha Buckhanon (Counterpoint)
• Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright)
• The Revisioners, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (Counterpoint)

NonFiction:

• Think Black: A Memoir, Clyde Ford (Amistad)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People, Ben Crump (Amistad)
• We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, Dani McClain (Bold Type Books)
• What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays, Damon Young (Ecco)

Poetry:

• & More Black, t’ai freedom ford (Augury Books)
• Syncope, Asiya Wadud (Ugly Duckling Presse)
• Night Angler (American Poets Continuum), Geffrey Davis (BOA Editions, LTD)
• 1919, Eve L. Ewing (Haymarket Books)
• Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins (Copper Canyon Press)

Fiction:

• A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf Press)
• She Would Be King, Wayétu Moore (Graywolf Press)
• Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Mariner)
• Brother, David Chariandy (Bloomsbury Publishing)
• Washington Black, Esi Edugyan (Alfred A. Knopf)

NonFiction:

• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Brittney Cooper (St. Martin’s Press)
• Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster, Stephen L. Carter (Henry Holt and Company)
• Tigerland: 1968-1969 A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing, Wil Haygood (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon (Scribner)
• The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart (Oxford University Press)

Poetry:

• Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples (University Press of Kentucky)
• Crosslight for Youngbird, Asiya Wadud (Nightboat Books)
• Approaching the Fields, Chanda Feldman (Louisiana State University Press)
• DiVida, Monica A. Hand (Alice James Books)
• Pardon My Heart, Marcus Jackson (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)

Debut Fiction:

• What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
• An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Fiction:

• The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
• The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines
• Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani

NonFiction:

• Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education by Noliwe Rooks
• The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty
• Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. by Danielle Allen
• Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy by Sheryll Cashin
• Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy

Poetry:

• Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey
• Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith
• City of Bones by Kwame Dawes
• Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
• In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae

Debut Fiction:

• Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
• Born on a Tuesday by Elnathan John

Fiction:

• The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier
• Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Mother by Yvvette Edwards
• The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
• Swing Time by Zadie Smith

NonFiction:

• The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, And Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson
• In The Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
• The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
• Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge

Poetry:

• play dead by francine j. harris
• Thief in the Interior by Phillip B. Williams
• Third Voice by Ruth Ellen Kocher
• Rapture by Sjohnna McCray
• The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Debut Fiction

• The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
• The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

Fiction:

• The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
• The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty
• Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
• Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

NonFiction:

• The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander
• Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic by Gerald Horne
• Where Everybody Looks Like Me: At the Crossroads of America’s Black Colleges and Culture by Ron Stodghill

• Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness by Harriet A. Washington
• The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America by D. Watkins

Poetry:

• Honest Engine by Kyle Dargan
• Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
• How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
• It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time by Angela Jackson
• Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

Fiction

• An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
• Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
• The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani
• Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah
• The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

NonFiction

• Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow
• This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
• Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen
• Malcolm X at Oxford Union by Saladin Ambar
• Losing Our Way by Bob Herbert

Poetry

• Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis
• King Me by Roger Reeves
• We Don’t Know Any Gangsters by Brian Gilmore
• Digest by Gregory Pardlo
• The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon by Willie Perdomo

Fiction

• See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid
• The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson
• Every Boy Should Have a Man by Preston L. Allen
• The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
• The Gospel According to Cane by Courttia Newland

NonFiction

• Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch
• Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
• Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home by Sheri Booker
• The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom  and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights by William P. Jones
• Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau

Poetry

• Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey
• The Cineaste: Poems by A. Van Jordan
• Silverchest by Carl Phillips
• The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka
• What We Ask of Flesh by Remica L. Bingham

Fiction

• Elsewhere, California by Dana Johnson
• Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden
• The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
• The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
• A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

NonFiction

• American Lynching by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
• Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
• Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City by Natalie Hopkinson
• Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery by Heather Andrea Williams
• There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe

Poetry

• But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
• me and Nina by Monica Hand

Fiction

• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
• Zone One by Colson Whitehead
• Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• You Are Free by Danzy Senna

NonFiction

• Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
• One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
• My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir by Mark Whitaker
• Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry

Poetry

• Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
• Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Fiction

• Glorious by Bernice L. McFadden
• Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
• How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories by Tiphanie Yanique
• How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu
• Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story

NonFiction

• Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation by Rawn James Jr.
• The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence Jackson
• Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority by Tom Burrell
• John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard
• Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Poetry

• Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
• Skin, Inc: Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis

Fiction

• Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
• Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
• Big Machine by Victor Lavalle
• Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
• The Trial of Robert Mugabe by Chielo Zona Eze

NonFiction

• Freedom by Any Means: True Stories of Cunning and Courage on the Underground Railroad by Betty DeRamus
• Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson by Wil Haygood
• More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson
• Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial by James A. Miller
• The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by Gwen Ifill

Poetry

• Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem by Mitchell L. H. Douglas
• Gospel by Samiya Bashir

Fiction:

• Holding Pattern: Stories by Jeffery Renard Allen
• Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward
• Blood Colony by Tananarive Due
• Song Yet Sung by James McBride
• Stand the Storm by Breena Clarke

NonFiction

• Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings
• The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth- Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
• Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power by Marcus Reeves
• The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African- American Family by Sheryll Cashin

Poetry

• Please by Jericho Brown
• Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa

Debut Fiction

• Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard
• Them by Nathan McCall

Fiction

• Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill
• The Story of the Cannibal Woman by Maryse Condé
• Measuring Time: A Novel by Helon Habila
• The Guyanese Wander by Jan Carew
• The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

NonFiction

• Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America by Sylviane A. Diouf
• On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century by Sherrilyn Ifill
• Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil and the African Slave Trade by Gerald Horne
• The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim

Poetry

• Conversion by Remica L. Bingham
• Quantum Lyrics by A. Van Jordan

Debut Fiction

• Get Down: Stories by Asali Solomon
• Unburnable by Marie-Elena John

Fiction

• Dominion: A Novel by Calvin Baker
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin
• Nowhere is a Place by Bernice L. McFadden
• Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

NonFiction

• The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei
• The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging by Kym Ragusa
• Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley by Christopher John Farley
• BookMarks: Reading in Black and White by Karla F.C. Holloway
• The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America by Walter C. Rucker

Poetry

• The Architecture of Language by Quincy Troupe
• Wind in a Box by Terrance Hayes

Debut Fiction

• Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe by Doreen Baingana
• Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon

Fiction

• Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham
• The Untelling by Tayari Jones
• Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips
• Joplin’s Ghost by Tananarive Due
• Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate

Nonfiction

• Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood by Donald Bogle
• Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists by Lisa E. Farrington
• My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations by Mary Frances Berry
• Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality by Dwight A. McBride
• Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition by Cheryl A. Wall

Contemporary Fiction

• Love on the Dotted Line by David E. Talbert
• Who Does She Think She is? by Benilde Little

Debut Fiction

• The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips
• The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan

Fiction

• The Dew Breaker by Edwige Danticat
• The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda
• American Desert by Percival Everett
• Links by Nuruddin Farah
• The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley

Nonfiction

• A Continent for the Taking by Howard French
• The End of Blackness by Debra J. Dickerson
• Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge by Ellis Cose
• The Black Interior by Elizabeth Alexander
• The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream by Sheryll Cashin

Contemporary Fiction

• Bling by Erica Kennedy
• Shifting Through Neutral by Bridgett M. Davis

Debut Fiction

• A Place Between Stations by Stephanie Allen
• Knee-Deep in Wonder by April Reynolds
• Daughter by Asha Bandele
• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
• Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks

Fiction

• A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips
• The Polished Hoe by Austin Clarke
• Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson

Nonfiction

• Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity by E. Patrick Johnson
• Mandela, Mobutu and Me by Lynne Duke
• Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful by Susan Fales-Hill
• Somebody’s Someone by Regina Louise
• Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd

Debut Fiction

• A Little Piece Of Sky by Nicole Bailey-Williams
• Fifth Born by Zelda Lockhart
• Gigantic by Marc Nesbitt
• River Woman by Donna Hemans
• Song of the Water Saints by Nelly Rosario

Fiction

• Douglass’ Women by Jewell Parker Rhodes
• The Ecstatic by Victor Lavalle
• Discretion by Elizabeth Nunez
• Water Street by Crystal Wilkinson
• Without a Name and Under the Tongue by Yvonne Vera

Nonfiction

• Passed On: African American Mourning Stories by Karla FC Holloway
• The Herndons: An Atlanta Family by Carole Merritt
• American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America by Leon E. Wynter
• Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius by Lawrence Jackson

Debut Fiction

• Greenwichtown by Joyce Palmer
• The Red Moon by Kuwana Haulsey
• Breathing Room by Patricia Elam
• Break Any Woman Down by Dana Johnson
• The Dying Ground by Nichelle D. Tramble

Fiction

• Bombingham by Anthony Grooms
• October Suite by Maxine Clair
• Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley
• He Sleeps by Reginald McKnight
• The Warmest December by Bernice L. McFadden

Nonfiction

• On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A’Lelia Bundles
• The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898–1939 by Paul Robeson Jr.
• Impossible Witnesses: Truths, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony by Dwight McBride
• Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story by Michael Datcher
• Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks