2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Winner: "Historian Ned Blackhawk recontextualizes five centuries of US, Native, and non-native histories to argue that in the face of extreme violence, land dispossession, and catastrophic epidemics, Indigenous peoples played, and continue to play, an essential role in the development of American democracy. [The book] brings Native American history to the forefront of the narrative, acknowledging Native communities’ agency, strength, and ongoing efforts to reclaim autonomy."

Finalist: "Inspired by global feminist movements, Cristina Rivera Garza travels to Mexico City to recover her sister’s unresolved case file nearly 30 years after she was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Drawing on police reports, notebooks, handwritten letters, and interviews from those who were closest to her, Rivera Garza preserves her sister’s legacy and examines how violence against women affects everyone, regardless of gender, in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice."

Finalist: "Three decades after his father’s assassination in 1985, attorney and activist Raja Shehadeh tasks himself with reviewing his father’s archives... A simultaneously personal and historically rich memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I probes the fraught relationship between a father and son, examining the many ways their lives are parallel both despite, and because of, disagreement."

Finalist: "Vaillant studies the May 2016 wildfire that devastated a small city in central Canada and its relationship to climate science, fossil fuels, and the unparalleled destruction brought about by modern wildfires in Fire Weather. Ultimately, Vaillant makes the case that the catastrophic Fort McMurray event was not an anomaly, but rather a foreboding window into what the future holds."

Finalist:"Ordinary Notes gathers personal and public artifacts that cover everything from history, art, photography, and literature, to beauty, memory, and language. Across 248 notes, Christina Sharpe examines the legacy of white supremacy and slavery, crowdsources entries for a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and presents a kaleidoscopic narrative that celebrates the Black American experience."

Longlist: "Williams examines the Reconstruction-era South from the perspective of formerly enslaved people as they began to build new lives in defiance of white supremacist violence. I Saw Death Coming investigates overlooked archival records, employs oral history methods, and includes new scholarship on the impacts of generational trauma to consider the enduring effects of political disenfranchisement, economic inequality, and anti-Black violence."

Longlist: "Ramsey explores the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s through four profiles of individuals whose lives were impacted by the crisis. Connecting the civil rights era and war on drugs to today’s conversations about police brutality, gentrification, and mass incarceration, When Crack Was King argues that the low-income Black and brown communities disproportionately affected should receive the assistance they have been denied for generations."

Longlist: "King: A Life—the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, and the first to include newly declassified FBI files— offers a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the civil rights leader as an imperfect man. Jonathan Eig’s lens provides new insights into the King family and wider activist network, while underscoring the relevance of King’s call for equality, freedom, and racial and economic justice today."

Longlist: "Prudence Peiffer pays homage to six artists who lived and worked on the same street in lower Manhattan during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Peiffer’s touching group biography questions the very idea of a “movement”—tracing the respective careers of this distinctive creative community and their impact on art and film in the late 20th century."

Longlist: "An intensely personal reflection of the Vietnamese refugee experience... A Man of Two Faces is a complex meditation on Nguyen’s life as a father and a son, and an exploration of the murkiness of memory and necessity of forgiveness."