National Book Award 2011 Finalists Announced

On October 12, 2011, the National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards.

The final winners of the National Book Awards will be announced at the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street, New York City on November 16, 2011, which will be hosted by John Lithgow. Awards of distinction to be given that night include the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community. This year the recipients will be poet John Ashbury and Mitchell Kaplan respectively. As for the National Book Awards themselves, finalists will receive $1,000 U.S. and a bronze medal each. Winners will each receive $10,000 U.S. and a bronze statue.

The finalists are listed below and grouped by catagory:

Fiction:

Andrew Krivak, "The Sojourn", (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, "The Tiger's Wife", (Random House)
Julie Otsuka, "The Buddha in the Attic", (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House)
Edith Pearlman, "Binocular Vision", (Lookout Books, an imprint of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington)
Jesmyn Ward, "Salvage the Bones", (Bloomsbury USA)

Nonfiction:

Deborah Baker, "The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism", (Graywolf Press)
Mary Gabriel, "Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution", (Little, Brown and Company)
Stephen Greenblatt, "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern", (W. W. Norton & Company)
Manning Marable, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention", (Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Group USA
Lauren Redniss, "Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout", (It Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Poetry:

Nikky Finney, "Head Off & Split", (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa, "The Chameleon Couch", (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips, "Double Shadow", (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich, "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010", (W.W. Norton & Company)
Bruce Smith, "Devotions", (University of Chicago Press)

Young People's Literature:

Franny Billingsley, "Chime", (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)
Debby Dahl Edwardson, "My Name Is Not Easy", (Marshall Cavendish)
Thanhha Lai, "Inside Out and Back Again", (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Albert Marrin, "Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy", (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books)
Lauren Myracle, "Shine", (Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS)
Gary D. Schmidt, "Okay for Now", (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The judges for 2011 are as follows: Fiction- Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li; Nonfiction- Alice Kaplan (Panel Chair), Yunte Huang, Jill Lepore, Barbara Savage; Poetry-Elizabeth Alexander (Panel Chair), Thomas Sayers Ellis, Amy Gerstler, Kathleen Graber, Roberto Tejada; and Young People's Literature- Marc Aronson (Panel Chair), Ann Brashares, Matt de la Peña, Nikki Grimes, and Will Weaver.