The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were recently announced in New York City. The National Book Critics Circle awards are given each March and honor the best literature published in the United States in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
This year, four of the six winners are women. Two have current affiliations at academic institutions.
Hope Jahren is an American who is a professor at the University of Oslo in Norway. She was honored for her autobiography Lab Girl (Vintage, 2016). A native of Austin, Minnesota, Dr. Jahren earned her bachelor’s degree in geology at the University of Minnesota. She went on to obtain a Ph.D. in soil science at the University of California, Berkeley. She began her academic career at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore before taking her research to Europe in 2009.
Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of African American studies at Emory University in Atlanta won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the criticism category. She was honored for her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Professor Anderson holds bachelor’s and master’s degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University. Dr. Anderson joined the faculty at Emory in 2009 after teaching at the University of Missouri. She is also the author of Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).