The Before Columbus Foundation recognizes the winners of the 44th Annual American Book Awards. The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community, honoring excellence in American Literature without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background or genre.

"It remains one of the signal honors of my career to have received the American Book Award for The Signifying Monkey. The Before Columbus Foundation has always understood diversity and literary achievement as intertwined. Diversity is not a goal to achieve; it is who we are as Americans, and the Before Columbus Foundation understands that now, and understood that then, even way back in the 1980s! On a personal note, it was the first award I’d received for my scholarship, and since the book was so controversial with older and established white scholars, receiving the award was a tremendous blessing to me: it made me aware that both my work and my field had merit, had value to other scholars of the tradition, and to some extent, had “arrived.” — Henry Louis Gates, winner of the American Book Award 1989 for The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

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Before Columbus Foundation - Website 

Check out the 2023 American Book Award Winners at SFPL.