The Before Columbus Foundation recently announced the winners of the 47th annual American Book Awards. The awards were established to recognize 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.
The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture-the whole comprises the parts.
In 1978, the board of directors of BCF decided that one of its programs should be a book award that would, for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restriction or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or advertising budget, or even genre.
Adela Najarro teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. She was honored for her poetry collection Variations in Blue (Red Hen Press, 2025). She is the author of five poetry collections and serves on the Círculo de poetas & Writers board of directors. Her extended family emigrated from Nicaragua. Dr. Najarro holds a master of fine arts degree from Vermont College and a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University.
Juliana Spahr is a professor at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University in Oakland. She was honored for her poetry collection Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Dr. Spahr is a graduate of Bard College in New York, where she majored in English Language and literatures. She holds a Ph.D. in English language and literatures from the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York System.
Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history and director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025). Professor Lew Williams is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University.
Deborah Willis is a University Professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was honored for her book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers: 1840 to the Present (Liveright, 2025). Dr. Willis is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art. She holds a master’s degree from the City University of New York, a master of fine arts degree from the Pratt Institute, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University in Virginia.
The American Book Award winners will be recognized on September 28 at a ceremony on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.