Her voice sometimes halting with emotion, Pavlin called his book “uncannily relevant to America in 2025.”
Winners of the other categories:
— Matar's contrasting narratives of three Libyans living in London won for fiction, with finalists including Percival Everett's "James," winner of the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize.
— Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” won for nonfiction.
— Carson's collection “Wrong Norma” won poetry.
— Cynthia Carr’s “Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar" won for biography
— Hanif Abdurraqib's “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” won for criticism
— Pedro Lemebel's “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper, won for a work in translation.
— Tessa Hulls' “Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir” won the John Leonard Prize for best debut book. Leonard, a renowned critic who died in 2008, helped found the NBCC in 1974.
Honorary awards were presented to “The House On Mango Street” author Sandra Cisneros, the Black-owned publisher Third World Press, critic Lauren Michele Jackson and author-educator Lori Lynn Turner. Maxine Hong Kingston, whose classic “The Woman Warrior” received an NBCC award in 1977, was a keynote speaker.