The National Book Awards announced their nominees on Wednesday morning, with the winners to be named on November 14. The fiction list gives 2011 winner Jesmyn Ward a chance for a second win, and includes two debuts, from Lisa Ko and Carmen Maria Machado. The full lists of finalists:
Fiction
Elliot Ackerman, Dark at the Crossing (Knopf)
Lisa Ko, The Leavers (Algonquin)
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (Grand Central)
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Graywolf)
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner)
Nonfiction
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37 Ink)
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead)
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday)
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking)
Young People’s Literature
Elana K. Arnold, What Girls Are Made Of (Carolrhoda Lab)
Robin Benway, Far from the Tree (HarperTeen)
Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Children’s)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Clayton Byrd Goes Underground (Amistad)
Ibi Zoboi, American Street (Balzer + Bray)
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus)
Leslie Harrison, The Book of Endings (University of Akron Press)
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)
Shane McCrae, In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press)
Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems (Graywolf)