Today is the day! I know everyone is as excited as I am... right?
OK, I guess I'll save you flipping back through your calendar and trying to remember what you've forgotten about today and just tell you: it's the 68th National Book Award Ceremony. For those who are excited about this event, you can stream it live.
I've been following the National Book Awards since I started working on social media for libraries five years ago. Don't get me wrong, I loved books long before that, but literary awards were only something that I was vaguely aware of and rarely rose to the level of active consciousness, at least in advance of the ceremony. I'm not sure I even knew that the lists of nominees (for most awards an initial "longlist" and then "shortlist" or list of "finalists") were announced publicly months in advance of the ceremonies themselves.
The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation every year since 1950, are specifically open to authors who are US citizens and published by a US publisher. The eligibility period is a publication date between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the award year. Books are nominated by their publishers. (Read more.)
Over the years, the National Book Awards have honored a diverse group of authors and styles from Flannery O'Connor to Ralph Ellison to William Faulkner, among many other notable names. The awards ceremony itself has elicited many moving moments, such as Congressman John Lewis's speech after winning the 2016 award for Young People's Literature for March, Book 3. In his speech, he shared a story of being refused entrance to a segregated library as a child and reflected on the path that had brought him to that award.
This year's awards season has been especially exciting for me because one of the fiction finalists, Carmen Maria Machado, has been my friend for over a decade. Carmen and I met as undergraduates and have kept in varying degrees of touch over the years as our lives have moved us around the country and through a variety of career and life transitions. I've followed her writing career and been aware of her collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, since it was first accepted for publication. However, despite all of that, I wasn't anticipating seeing a familiar cover in the National Book Foundation's longlist announcement:
Perhaps you can understand how this changed my interest in the awards season? I started emailing and texting other friends, tweeted at our alma mater, and immediately memorized the announcement dates for both the finalists (October 4) and the award announcement (today, November 15). Needless to say, we'll be following the awards ceremony closely tonight.
Want to find Carmen's book or the other 2017 National Book Awards finalists? Check out the full list.
Happy reading!
LenneaLabels: Books, e-Books, Reading
