Ann Patchett is the author of ten novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Whistler, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
KAVEH AKBAR’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. He lives in Iowa City.
Priscilla Morris is a British author of Bosnian and Cornish parentage. She grew up in London, spending summers in Sarajevo, and studied at Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia. She teaches creative writing and divides her time between Ireland and Spain. Inspired by real-life accounts of the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–96), Black Butterflies is her debut novel. It was short-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Wilbur Smith Prize, the Nota Bene Prize and the Women’s Prize 2023.
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University and professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is the author of five books, most recently The Burning Earth, and recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, a fellowship at the British Academy, and the 2024 Fukuoka Prize. He grew up in Singapore and lives in Connecticut.
Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
Alfred A. Knopf
An engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a Chinese mother’s tumultuous relationship with her strong-willed, outspoken daughter who is distinctly reminiscent of herself. Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, exploring how patterns from childhood get repeated or shattered, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as immensely incisive as it is compassionate.
Outside Women by Roohi Choudhry
University Press of Kentucky
Would you risk your own life to pursue justice for a stranger? Two migrant women—separated by geographies and generations—face this same devastating choice.
Lured from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant. 100 years later, Hajra is forced to flee her home in Pakistan after witnessing violence. Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women valiantly carving their places outside of patriarchal norms as they search for kinship and strength.
The Antidote by Karen Russell
Alfred A. Knopf
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
The Sunflower Boy by Sam Wachman
HarperCollins
Twelve-year-old Artem’s life in Ukraine is mundane; however, Artem has struggled with romantic feelings for his best friend. In a country where love between boys is unthinkable, Artem worries this will undo his life.
Until one night, Artem and his younger brother are woken by explosions. The Russians destroy their home, killing their mother and leaving the boys to fend for themselves. Fleeing to find their father, the brothers traverse the country with nothing but their backpacks and each other.
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh
Simon & Schuster
A “wonderfully brash and sparkling” (Oprah Daily, Best Books of the Year) novel that explores exile, love, and freedom across three generations of women—“a Palestinian American Sex and the City” (The Atlantic).
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books
The Salt family are the last remaining caretakers of the seed bank on the remote island of Shearwater. As rising sea levels force them into relocation, their world is upended when a mysterious woman washes ashore asking a few too many questions.
A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.
By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine by Danielle Leavitt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered.
Free: My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox
Grand Central Publishing
Free recounts how Knox survived prison, the mistakes she made, the misadventures she had reintegrating into society, and culminates in the untold story of her return to Italy—and the extraordinary relationship she’s built with the man who sent her to prison. It is the gripping saga of what happens when you become the definition of notorious, but have quietly returned to the matters of a normal life—seeking a life partner, finding a job, or even just going out in public.
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack
Crown / Penguin Random House
The inspiring history of a Charleston Church’s profound grief, unbending faith, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into survival. Through the microcosm of one congregation, Sack explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from White churches in 1817, through the traumas of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
Original Sins: The (Mis) education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing
One World
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing offers a provocative answer: they do. Drawing on meticulous historical research, she argues that America’s educational system was never designed to be a great equalizer—it was built to reinforce racial hierarchy, from Jefferson’s era to today. Yet Ewing doesn’t stop at critique. She also celebrates teaching and learning as acts of resistance, making a powerful case for reimagining what schools could be.
The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull
Penguin Press
A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.
The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice by Jack Fairweather
Crown/Penguin Random House
The remarkable story of Fritz Bauer, a gay, Jewish judge from Stuttgart who survived the Nazis and made it his mission to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide. Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records, and exclusive interviews to immerse readers in the shadowy, unfamiliar world of postwar West Germany where those who implemented genocide run the country, the CIA is funding Hitler’s former spy-ring, and Nazi-era anti-gay laws are strictly enforced.
Jung Yun
Jung Yun is the author of O BEAUTIFUL, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and SHELTER, which was long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Indiana Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among others. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and serves on the board of directors at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her forthcoming novel is ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD, which will be published in March 2026 by 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster.
Michael Parker
Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World–and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since. His work has appeared in journals including the Georgia Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Southwest Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men’s Journal. He has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Beth Nguyen
Beth Nguyen is the author of the memoirs Owner of a Lonely Heart and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Essays. Nguyen is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Margaret Lazarus Dean is the author of Leaving Orbit, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and a New York Times top ten book of 2015. She is also the co-writer, with Scott Kelly, of his New York Times bestselling memoir Endurance as well as the author of a novel, The Time It Takes to Fall. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf and has been awarded residencies with MacDowell and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, the New Yorker, and Popular Mechanics, among others; she has served as a judge for the American Academy in Berlin fellowship, the AWP Grace Paley Prize, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships. She lives in Knoxville, where she is Lindsay Young Professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee.
The 2024 Awards Ceremony was held at 5:00 pm on Sunday, November 10th, 2024, at the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center at One West Second Street in Dayton, Ohio. Gilbert King was the Master of Ceremonies.
Richard C. Holbrooke Award President Jimmy Carter
Fiction Award Paul Lynch for Prophet Song
Nonfiction Award Victor Luckerson for Built From The Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street
Fiction Runner-up Anne Berest for The Postcard
Nonfiction Runner-up Tania Branigan for Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution
Gilbert King is the writer, producer, and host of Bone Valley, a nine-part narrative podcast about murder and injustice in 1980s central Florida, from Lava for Good podcasts. He is the author of three books, most recently, Beneath a Ruthless Sun. His previous book, Devil in the Grove, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. A New York Times bestseller, the book was also named runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and he was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. King’s earlier book, The Execution of Willie Francis, was published in 2008. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
