Maya Angelou Book Award Winners
2026 Maya Angelou Book Award Short List Announced
- Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma is a literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa.
- The Disappearers by Marlon James tells the story of a group of gay men in 1980s Jamaica and the tragic consequences after one is murdered.
- Desperate Bodies: Stories by Lydia Mathis depicts the fragility, strength, and unruliness of Black women and girls’ bodies and the power in being honest about their desires.
- Make Your Way Home: Stories is Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories.
- Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World is a portrait of Hawai’i and a powerful meditation on family, queer love, and community amid imperialism and environmental collapse.
Past Winners
2025 | Poetry
Black Bell is a collection that ruminates on themes of history, resistance, and liberation with ambitious, inventive imagery and sound.
2024 | Fiction
Witness: Stories is a short story collection set in New York City that follows narratives of actions taken and not taken.
2023 | Poetry
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times explores a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood, inspired by the film, The Wiz. Byas is a Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
2022 | Fiction
An Ordinary Wonder is about a Nigerian boy’s secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl, “highlights the limiting dangers of the gender binary, while also reminding us of the power storytelling has to help us envision a more expansive and inclusive world.”
2021 | Poetry
Moving between English and Arabic, The Wild Fox of Yemen examines the life of a young Muslim woman in New York, half a world away from her roots in Yemen. Almontaser describes it as a love letter to her home country and the people of Yemen.