The Before Columbus Foundation recently announced the winners of the 46th annual American Book Awards. The prestigious honor was established to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. With no categories and no nominees, the American Book Awards aim to recognize literary excellence without limits or restrictions.
This year, 15 works of fiction authored or edited by 19 writers and poets were awarded an American Book Award. Among this year’s cohort of award-winners are seven women currently holding faculty appointments at American-based institutions.
Amy Alvarez, associate professor of practice in the Messina College at Boston College, won for her poetry collection, Makeshift Altar: Poems (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). In her collection, Alvarez weaves together themes of environment, family, and migration, as well as her own ancestry as a Black Latinx woman, to showcase the meaning of home and existence and the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American.
Before joining the Boston College faculty in 2024, Alvarez taught at West Virginia University for eight years. Earlier, she was a lead English teacher at Boston Day and Evening Academy. In addition to Makeshift Altar, she is a co-author of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Alvarez holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, a master’s degree in English education from the City College of New York, and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine.
Marie-Helene Bertino, the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence and a lecturer in English at Yale University, won for her novel Beautyland (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024). A science-fiction novel, Beautyland has won numerous awards and has been honored as a best book of 2024 by The New York Times, Esquire, Time, and several other prominent media outlets.
Bertino is the author of two other novels and two short story collections, including the recently released Exit Zero: Stories (FSG Originals, 2025). Throughout her career, she has taught creative writing courses at several institutions, including Temple University in Philadelphia, New York University, The New School, and the Institute for American Indian Arts. A graduate of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, Bertino earned her master of fine arts degree in creative writing and fiction from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Marcela Fuentes, associate professor of creative writing at Texas Christian University, won for her debut novel, Malas (Penguin Books, 2024), a work of historical fiction that ties together the stories of two women from different generations living in a Texas border town. In addition to its latest honor, the book has won several other awards, including the Best First Book of Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters.
At Texas Christian University, Dr. Fuentes focuses on fiction writing, creative nonfiction, Latine literature, and Indigenous literature. During the 2016-2017 academic year, she was the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Dr. Fuentes holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University.
Stacey Levine, professor of English at Seattle Central College, won for her novel, Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press, 2024). The book concerns a young woman bullied for her albinism during the Cold War era. Mice 1961 was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize and included in the Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Fiction” list in 2024.
Levine’s latest award-winning publication is her fifth book. She has been publishing for over three decades, beginning with her short story collection My Horse and Other Stories (Sun & Moon Press, 1993). A faculty member at Seattle Central College since 2009, Levine studied at the University of Missouri and the University of Washington.
Claire Messud, the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University, won for her novel, This Strange Eventful History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). Inspired in part by stories of Messud’s own family’s history, the book follows a pieds-noirs family over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010.
A recipient of both Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships, Messud has published six works of fiction over the past 30 years. She has been a faculty member with Harvard since 2015 and has previously taught writing courses at Yale University, Amherst College in Massachusetts, Kenyon College in Ohio, and the University of Maryland. Messud earned her bachelor’s degree at Yale University and her master’s degree from the University of Cambridge in England.
Danzy Senna, professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, won for her novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024). Described as a dark comedy, the book follows a novelist-turned-television writer living in Los Angeles, covering themes of love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex.
The author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, Senna focuses her writing on multiracial and complex social identities. Her first novel, Caucasia (Riverhead Books, 1998), has been translated into 12 languages and has become required reading for several English and African American college courses. A native of Boston, Senna holds a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Stanford University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Lauri Scheyer, professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, won for co-editing Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), a collection of poems by A. B. Spellman, an American poet and former arts administrator with the National Endowment of the Arts. Dr. Scheyer shares her award with Spellman, whose work primarily focuses on jazz music and African American culture.
A Cal State LA faculty member since 2004, Dr. Scheyer currently holds an appointment as the Xiaoxiang Distinguished Professor at Hunan Normal University in China. Earlier in her career, she founded Hampton University’s African American Poetry Collection – the world’s first archival repository dedicated to African American poetry. She has also taught at several institutions in the United Kingdom, including the University of Bedfordshire, where she founded the U.K.’s first bachelor’s degree program in creative writing. An honors graduate of Oberlin College, Dr. Scheyer holds a master’s degree in creative writing and English literature and a Ph.D. in English and American language and literature from the University of Chicago.