World Literary Awards

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American Book Awards あめりかんぶっくあわーど

Edition 13 (1992)

Literary awardMulticultural literatureNo genre restrictions (novels, poetry, non-fiction, etc.)

Winners

18 people

A graphic novel that follows Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman's testimony alongside the author's conversations with his father, Art. It layers family history, memory, guilt, and generational rupture into a sharply visual account of war's afterlife.

It redraws the shadow of the Holocaust through a son's search through his father's memories.

296 pages
Holocaustfamily historymemorytraumagraphic novelgenerational conflict

A complete graphic-novel edition about the Holocaust that layers Vladek Spiegelman's testimony with his son's conversations, exploring family history, memory, and trauma through visual storytelling.

It redraws the shadow of war through a son's search through his father's memories.

295 pages
Holocaustfamily historymemorytraumagraphic novel

A poetry collection rooted in New Mexico landscapes and memory. Its poems move through desert light, family, and cultural belonging with spare intensity.

Memory of dry land becomes the breathing space of the poems.

80 pages
poetryNew MexicomemoryChicano literature

A landmark essay collection on feminism, science, technology, and the unstable borders of nature. Using the cyborg as a key metaphor, it challenges fixed binaries.

The cyborg becomes a metaphor for remaking boundaries.

312 pages
essaysfeminismscience studiestechnology
Fritjof Capra Winner

A book-length exploration of the overlap between science and spirituality. It sets new scientific thinking beside religious insight and asks what it means to belong to the universe.

It searches for a sense of belonging in the space between science and religion.

217 pages
sciencespiritualitydialogueideas

A bilingual poetry anthology shaped by Chicano identity, displacement, and personal memory. The poems move between private experience and political belonging.

Bilingual poems sketch the contours of a life shaped by movement.

173 pages
poetrybilingual writingChicano literaturedisplacement
Keith Gilyard Winner

A study of language competence that combines memoir and scholarship. Keith Gilyard examines African American language, schooling, and his own experience to show how knowledge and identity intersect.

It follows one’s own voice while thinking through the relation between language and education.

184 pages
language studieseducationmemoirAfrican American literature
Lucy Thompson Winner

A memoir-like record by a Yurok woman that preserves Native life, history, and cultural survival.

292 pages
Native American literaturememoircultural preservation

An essayistic study of late twentieth-century Japan that follows dissenting voices to expose political and cultural fault lines.

299 pages
Japanese studieshistoryculture
Peter Bacho Winner

A novel about a Filipino American man’s reckoning with family, faith, and cultural conflict.

212 pages
novelmigrationFilipino American experience

A large bilingual collection of Dena'ina and English writings, bringing together stories, lessons, songs, poems, place names, and autobiographical pieces. It preserves Peter Kalifornsky's voice across nearly two decades of work.

A bilingual record that passes Dena'ina language and memory to the next generation.

527 pages
Indigenous literaturebilingual editionoral traditionmemoir

A Southern novel set in Georgia, tracing family memory, faith, romance, and the tensions between women in one household. Raymond Andrews explores the emotional complexity that runs through an African American family.

Family memory and private desire quietly collide in the South.

202 pages
fictionfamilyAfrican American literatureGeorgia

A psychological family novel centered on twin brothers and the pressures that grow inside one household. Set in Oregon, it follows how love, obligation, and rivalry shape a family over time.

It quietly digs up the pain buried deep within a family.

310 pages
fictionfamilypsychological fictionOregon

A picture-book history of Japanese Americans that follows the story from exclusion and incarceration to renewal. Based on Hamanaka’s mural, it presents the experience in a clear, visually driven form for younger readers.

A mural tells the story of the Japanese American journey.

40 pages
picture bookJapanese American historyhistory educationvisual art

An oral history of the wartime internment of Italian and German nationals in the United States. It reconstructs a little-known chapter of the war through testimony and documentary evidence.

It uncovers a forgotten history of detention through testimony.

272 pages
historyWorld War IIoral historyimmigration history

A critical study of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, read through both political commitment and artistic form. It places her plays in the context of civil-rights politics and Black women’s representation.

It reads Hansberry’s theater at the intersection of politics and aesthetics.

216 pages
criticismtheater studiescivil rightsBlack women

A nonfiction portrait of a Buffalo bar and the Polish-American family behind it. Through one neighborhood business, the book traces urban change, work, and memory.

A single bar becomes a doorway into the history of a city.

209 pages
nonfictionfamily historyurban historyPolish American life

An anthology of contemporary African American drama, collecting plays written mainly after 1975. It showcases the range of Black theater and frames the movement with an extensive introduction.

It gathers the power of contemporary Black theater into one volume.

496 pages
play anthologyBlack theateranthologycultural history