Five finalists have been announced for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Of the five nominees, two are women. Both women have ties to academia. The winner will be announced on November 20.
Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was nominated for the Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A Knopf, 2013). Jane Franklin was Benjamin Franklin’s younger sister.
Professor Lepore joined the Harvard faculty in 2003. She also serves as a staff writer for The New Yorker. Dr. Lepore is a graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She holds a master’s degree in American culture from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. Her other books include The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), and The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton University Press, 2010).
Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College in California and a research associate at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She is being honored for her book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
Professor Lower is a graduate of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She holds a Ph.D. from American University in Washington, D.C. Her earlier books include Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).