Do You Teach History? December Spotlight

Imbolo Mbue has been awarded the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers.

Heather Ann Thompson, an historian at the University of Michigan has won the 2017 Bancroft Prize in History for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

The Nonfiction Windham Campbell Prize was awarded to Maya Jasanoff for her “brilliant historical writing [which] brings to life forgotten worlds and characters in richly textured narratives.”

The National Book Critics Circle will present awards to Margaret Atwood and Yaa Gyasi on March 16, 2017 at the New School.

Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It, by Larrie D. Ferreiro, was bestowed The Journal of American Revolution Book of the Year Award.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead was honored as the 2016 National Book Award Winner in Fiction.

President Obama awarded Sandra Cisneros and Moises Kaufman a National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States government.

Poet Sharon Olds received the Academy of American Poets’ 2016 Wallace Stevens Award. Given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, the award was established in 1994, and carries a $100,000 stipend.

Flora Fraser was awarded the 2016 George Washington Prize for THE WASHINGTONS on May 25 at a black-tie gala at the Mount Vernon estate

The 2016 Pulitzer Prizes, honoring excellence in Journalism and the Arts, were announced recently and Knopf Doubleday is delighted to have published two winners—Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of New America by T.J. Stiles for history and Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick for general non-fiction.

Joy Williams has been named the 2016 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction honoree.

Congratulations to Mia Alvar, who has won the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for her short story collection In the Country. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, and now available as a Vintage paperback, In the Country is comprised of nine stories that give voice to the women and men of the Philippines and its diaspora and explore the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined.