National Book Critics Circle

What Makes a Critic?
2023-05-06 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Residence Inn Berkeley – Ballroom 2, 2121 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Much has changed in the world of letters since 1890, when Oscar Wilde famously wrote that “the critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.” These days, when Goodreads reviews and social media takedowns outnumber dwindling book review publications and shrinking newspaper book pages, what role does professional criticism still play, and how can aspiring critics best prepare to engage in the literary discourse? The National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Fellowship seeks to identify, nurture, and support the development of the next generation of book critics. In this session, recent Emerging Critics—Yohanca Delgado, Ricardo Jaramillo, Jonathan Leal, Antonio López, and Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon—will reflect on their own development as critics and discuss what the next generation of book critics will bring to the table, in a conversation moderated by NBCC President Heather Partington.
Find the event on the Bay Area Book Festival website here.
Yohanca Delgado is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts recipient. Her recent fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, Story, and elsewhere. Her recent essays appear in TIME, The Believer, and New York Times Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the 2019 Clarion workshop.
Ricardo Jaramillo is a poet and writer from Philadelphia. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Believer, and The Rumpus, among other places. He was an inaugural 2021 PERIPLUS fellow, and a 2019-2020 Fulbright teaching fellow at La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Currently, he works as a case manager at a school for immigrant youth in the Oakland Unified School District.
Jonathan Leal is an author, composer, and researcher based in Los Angeles. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, a South Texas region located at the border of the United States and Mexico, Jonathan works as an artist-scholar to create writing and collaborative arts projects that grapple with issues of borders and memory, place and belonging, technology and aesthetics, and creative and political practices. His musical projects have been featured in Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla, Latino USA, and elsewhere, and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (forthcoming August 2023 from Duke University Press) and co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury 2021). A former Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle (2018–2019), Jonathan holds a PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Southern California.
Antonio López is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a CantoMundo Fellow. He holds degrees from Duke University, Rutgers-Newark, and the University of Oxford. He is pursuing a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. His debut poetry collection, Gentefication, was selected by Gregory Pardlo as the winner of the 2019 Levis Prize in Poetry. Antonio is currently fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest council member for the City of East Palo Alto. www.barrioscribe.com.
Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, an interdisciplinary humanities department. Her dissertation asks how a novel’s formal choices are also ethical ones: how texts (especially modernist novels) express an ethical position, and position us ethically. Before Berkeley, she wrote middle school math curricula and then worked in strategy consulting.
Moderator Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is president of the National Book Critics Circle, also served as the Vice President in charge of the Emerging Critics program and was one of the NBCC’s first cohort of Emerging Critics. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Alta Journal, among other publications. She lives in Elk Grove, California.

NBCC Awards
2023-03-23 18:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | The New School Auditorium, 66 West 12th St, New York, NY, 10003, United States
After three years of virtual awards ceremonies, the National Book Critics Circle will return to the New School for an in-person awards ceremony on March 23, 2023, followed by a reception sponsored by International Literary Properties. We’re so excited to join together and celebrate once again!
First, on March 22, we will hold a virtual event with readings from the finalists.
Registration for all events will be handled by our co-sponsor Wildbound, who will also present the virtual readings.
Advance registration for the ceremony is mandatory, as per covid protocol, and all guests will need to present ID + proof of vaccine.
Please register at Wildbound and choose from one of three options: 1) readings; 2) readings and ceremony; or 3) readings, ceremony, and reception.
The readings and ceremony are free, and tickets for the reception are $60 for NBCC members and $80 for non-members.

The National Book Critics Circle Presents Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Namwali Serpell, Moderated by Jane Ciabattari
2023-03-10 15:20 - 16:35 (America/Los_Angeles) | Ballroom 2 & 3, Level 5, Seattle Convention Center
A literary partner featured event focused on two National Book Critics Circle’s honorees who work in multiple genres, moderated by NBCC VP/Events Jane Ciabattari, featuring NBCC Fiction Award winner Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and NBCC Criticism finalist Namwali Serpell. They’ll focus on writing in multiple genres (both write innovative fiction and cultural criticism; Jeffers also is a poet), inspiration and research for their work (both write novels with history, justice, surreal elements), the influence of NBCC and other awards, Afro-futurism and other evolving forms, the unique challenges of writing in these times, and the imaginative process that shapes their work. Since 1974, the National Book Critics Circle awards have honored the best literature published in English. These are the only awards chosen by the critics themselves.
See our event on the AWP website: https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/presenters_view_2023/nbcc
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. Her first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and selected for Oprah’s Book Club. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, which won the 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield Wolf award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Grand Prix des Associations Litterarires Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She is a co-recipient of a 2020 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction. She is the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty, a book of literary criticism, and Stranger Faces, a finalist for the NBCC award for criticism. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.
Jane Ciabattari, author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire, is a former National Book Critics Circle president (and current NBCC vice president/events), and a member of the Writers Grotto. Her reviews, interviews, and cultural criticism have appeared in NPR, BBC Culture, New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Bookforum, Paris Review, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

Say The Right Thing
2023-02-23 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Zoom
In this NBCC Zoom event, two NYU scholars—and the authors of the forthcoming book Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice—argue that sweeping legal changes aren’t the only way to make our country more fair and inclusive. It’s also day-to-day, person-to-person conversations that can move an entire society toward a brighter future. Moderated by NBCC member Julie Lythcott-Haims. This event will be streamed online with live captioning.
Register for this event here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tVcMKkn2QdiNLWMdVGVmYw

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the faculty director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. He is the author of three previous books, and his writing has been published in major academic journals as well as popular venues such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Yoshino is on the board of the Brennan Center for Justice, advisory boards for diversity and inclusion at Charter Communications and Morgan Stanley, and on the board of his children’s school.
David Glasgow is the executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He has written for a range of publications including the Harvard Business Review, HuffPost, and Slate, and served as an Associate Director of the Public Interest Law Center at NYU School of Law.
Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, public service, and activism. She is a New York Times bestselling author of books on human development, a TED speaker, a former Stanford dean, and a lawyer, and she holds degrees from Stanford University (BA), Harvard Law (JD), and California College of the Arts (MFA). She has served on numerous nonprofit boards whose work focuses on equity, education, youth, wellness, or the arts, and she currently serves on the boards of Black Women’s Health Imperative and Narrative Magazine, and on the Board of Trustees at California College of the Arts. She serves on the advisory boards of LeanIn.org, Sir Ken Robinson Foundation, and Baldwin for the Arts.

Trans Literature Now: A Panel Discussion
2023-02-16 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Zoom
“Trans Literature Now” invites experts from different sectors of the literary business for an interdisciplinary conversation about living, writing, reading, and publishing trans life today. Kay Gabriel, C. Riley Snorton, Denne Michele Norris, Casey Plett, and Neon Yang will be in discussion with moderator Jo Livingstone. Co-sponsored by the National Book Critics’ Circle and Barnard’s Center for Research on Women, this event will be streamed online with live captioning.
Register for this event here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CO-A-QogQUyRcfyN4jeU5A

Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.
C. Riley Snorton is professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).He is also the co-editor of the flagship journal in queer studies, GLQ: a journal of GLBTQ studies, published by Duke University Press.
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She’s the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022) and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021; Nightboat, 2023). With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She lives in Queens.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, where she is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and Apogee Journal. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House.

Neon Yang is a Singaporean writer of science fiction and fantasy. They are the author of The Genesis of Misery and the Tensorate series of novellas (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters and The Ascent to Godhood). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Lambda Literary and Locus awards, while the Tensorate novellas were an Otherwise Award honoree in 2018. They are queer and nonbinary, and live in the UK.

Jo Livingstone is a critic in New York.

2022 NBCC Awards Finalists Announcement
2023-01-31 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Wildbound Live
Join us as we announce our finalists for the 2022 NBCC Awards—in fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism—as well as for the John Leonard Prize for the best first book in any genre, the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and Toni Morrison Achievement Award, and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize!
Register to watch the announcement of the finalists here: https://www.wildboundlive.com/events/nbccjanuary2023
If you can’t make the live program at 7pm EST, you can replay the event at anytime—but you still need to register! Once registered, you’ll receive an email with details on where you can watch a replay.

Criticism in Isolation: An NBCC Craft Panel
2022-11-14 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | Zoom
Criticism in Isolation looks at one book, reviewed from multiple angles, to put readers in the minds of critics and showcase the many different ways to write a review. In this discussion, critics discuss their approach to reviewing Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MjwnLP4RSnyTZbaY6YFwpA
Our panelists include:

Walton Muyumba, Former NBCC Board Member; Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington (Review in The Boston Globe)
Blair McClendon, Independent Writer and Filmmaker (Review in Bookforum)
Karen Sandstrom, Independent Writer and Illustrator (Review in The Washington Post)
Marion Winik, Former NBCC Board Member; Professor, University of Baltimore (Review in the Star-Tribune)

Moderated by NBCC Criticism Chair J. Howard Rosier
Curated by Dan Kubis, Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Brooklyn Book Festival: A Bookend Event with Debut Authors
2022-09-28 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago)
John Leonard Prize winners and nominees Torrey Peters, Larissa Pham,
and Kirstin Valdez Quade join the National Book Critics Circle to talk about
what happens after the debut. How have their careers changed? What are
they working on now? What are some problems they’ve encountered as
they’ve begun to contemplate what’s next?

Moderated by NBCC Online VP David Varno.

Join us on Zoom.

Celebrating the NBCC’s Emerging Critics: How Is a Book Critic Made?
2022-04-07 20:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
Celebrating the NBCC’s Emerging Critics: How is a Book Critic Made?
A conversation featuring the NBCC’s Emerging Critics Past and Present.
Thursday, April 7th at 8:00 PM ET/5:00 PM PT. Online.

With Emerging Critics Fellowship program founder, past NBCC president, and current board member Elizabeth Taylor and Emerging Critics from each cohort, describing how the Emerging Critics program works, and how it has influenced them. We’ll hear from Emerging Critics including NBCC board member and criticism chair Justin Rosier, incoming board members Mandana Chaffa and Jennie Hann, and Rishi Reddi, author of Passage West. Moderated by former Emerging Critic and current VP/Emerging Critics Heather Scott Partington. ASL interpreter: Mailyn Hill. Closed captions available. Organized by VP/Events Jane Ciabattari.

Free event. Zoom registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sdtihL9VSXCoQD9ON7Cwxg

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To request an accommodation, or for inquiries about accessibility, please contact us.

Panelists:

Mandana Chaffa is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, and an Editor at Chicago Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies. She serves on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

Jennie Hann earned her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins in 2017 with a dissertation on Robert Browning, Henry James, and the problem of other minds. The following year, she was selected as an Emerging Critic by the NBCC. A contributor to the Baltimore Fishbowl, she is presently a Fellow in the JHU Writing Seminars, where she’s at work on a biography of the late poet Mark Strand.

Rishi Reddi is the author of the novel Passage West, a Los Angeles Times “Best California Book of 2020″ and, Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. A National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow for 2021-2022, her reviews, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Alta Journal, Salamander, Partisan Review and Literary Hub, among others, and are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Air/Light Magazine. Rishi has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the U.S. Department of State. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
J. Howard Rosier sits on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Art in America, 4Columns, Poetry, Frieze, The Nation, and elsewhere. He is a co-curator at Exhibit B—a bimonthly text-based performance series—and a lecturer in the New Arts Journalism department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Taylor, past president of the National Book Critics Circle, has chaired five Pulitzer Prize juries and is co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley – His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen. Together they founded The National Book Review. Twice juror of the Mark Lynton/J. Anthony Lukas prizes, she has chaired the Harold Washington Literary Award four times and is Creative Director of the Printers Row Lit Fest. She has spoken at the White House as part of its “Salute to Women Authors” and at the Library of Congress on the State of American Fiction. She was a Correspondent for Time Magazine based in New York and then Chicago and later served as the Chicago Tribune Literary Editor, as well as Sunday magazine editor and continued as Literary Editor at Large. She is currently writing a biography involving the Civil War and Reconstruction for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

Moderator:

Heather Scott Partington, current board member and VP/Emerging Critics for the National Book Critics Circle, is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She was one of seven inaugural Emerging Critics Fellows for the National Book Critics Circle. Her criticism has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, The Star Tribune, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is a regular contributor to Kirkus and Alta Journal of California. Heather was the 2019-2020 critic in residence for UC Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA. She lives in Elk Grove, California.

NBCC at AWP22 On Comics Criticism: Graphic Novels as Both Literature and Pop
2022-03-26 12:10 - 13:25 (America/New_York) | 121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level, 1101 Arch St, Philadelphia, PA, 19107, United States
121BC, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Saturday, March 26, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm Eastern
https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/event_detail/21792
The medium of comics is well-established as presenting works of literary value, but critical writing can be mired in a defensive position (not just for kids; not just illustration; not just a fad). Critics and culture writers discuss the challenges and opportunities in embracing comics as both literature and pop culture; the essential role of diverse communities in comics; drawing on art, literary, and film criticism as reference; the pitfalls of boosterism; and how criticism pushes the field.
Critical writing about comics is uniquely positioned, bridging literary and art criticism. There’s been a boom of graphic novels published by trade houses, academic publishers, and an increasing number of literary magazines, and book reviewers are still catching up to how and why to write about these books. This panel brings together critics from insider-comics world journals, academic spheres, and popular literary forums, with diverse backgrounds and identities to delve deep into their craft.
Panelists:
Rob Kirby is a cartoonist and writer currently living in St. Paul, MN. He is the author of Curbside Boys (Cleis Press) and the editor of several anthologies including the Ignatz Award-winning QU33R (Northwest Press), The Shirley Jackson Project: Comics Inspired by Her Life and Work (Ninth Art Press) and The Book of Boy Trouble Volumes 1 & 2. His graphic memoir Marry Me a Little is forthcoming in 2023 from Graphic Mundi, the graphic imprint of Penn State University Press. Rob was a guest editor for Illustrated PEN from 2016 to 2018. He is a freelance reviewer for Publishers Weekly, The Comics Journal and Solrad.
Jonathan W. Gray, Associate Professor English at the CUNY Graduate Center & John Jay College, works on US popular culture after WWII and African American literary production. His first book, Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (Mississippi) traces the white literary responses to the period between the Brown case and the death of Martin Luther King. His forthcoming project, Illustrating the Race (Columbia), investigates how the twin understandings of illustration—the creative act of depiction and the political act of bringing forth for public consideration—function in the representation of African Americans in comics and graphic narratives published since 1966. Prof. Gray contributed to Keywords in Comics Studies (NYU), and co-edited Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels (Palgrave McMillian). His writing has also appeared in Film Quarterly, the New Republic and Entertainment Weekly.

Tahneer Oksman is an Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. She is the author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press), and the co-editor of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (University Press of Mississippi), which won the 2020 Comics Studies Society Prize for Best Edited Collection. Her cultural journalism can be found in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, The Guardian, The Believer, The Women’s Review of Books, and other places. For more, visit tahneeroksman.com

Moderator:
Meg Lemke is the graphic novels reviews editor at Publishers Weekly as well as Editor-in-Chief of MUTHA Magazine, which publishes “some of the finest comics about modern motherhood” (Nat. Brut). She’s acted as series editor for the Illustrated PEN series (PEN America) and curated programs at PEN World Voices Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and for the French Comics Association. Previously, she was a book editor at Teachers College Press at Columbia University, Seven Stories Press, and Houghton Mifflin, where she launched the Best American Comics series. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Seattle Review, The Atlanta Review, and Seleni, among other places. Find her @meglemke.

AWP22 Philadelphia: Celebrating the John Leonard Award With the National Book Critics Circle
2022-03-25 15:20 - 16:35 (America/New_York)
Top row, L-R: Raven Leilani (photo by Nina Stubin), Carmen Maria Machado (photo by Art Streiber). Bottom row, L-R: Kirstin Valdez Quade (photo by Holly Andres), David Varno.

Friday, March 25, 2022, 3:20pm-4:35 pm Eastern. A Literary Partner event.

Celebrating the National Book Critics Circle’s First Book Award
A literary partner featured event focused on the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard award winners, featuring Leonard award winners Raven Leilani, Carmen Maria Machado, Kirstin Valdez Quade. They’ll focus on launching a literary career, inspiration and research for their work, the influence of Leonard and other awards, evolving forms, the unique challenges of writing in these times, the imaginative process that shapes their work.
Raven Leilani’s first novel, Luster, won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence.
Carmen Maria Machado’s story collection Her Body and Other Parties won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and was a National Book Award finalist.
Kirstin Valdez Quade‘s story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.
Moderator: David Varno is National Book Critics Circle President and Fiction Editor at Publishers Weekly.

NBCC Awards Ceremony, Fundraiser, and Finalists Reading
2022-03-17 17:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
Join us on Thursday, March 17, for the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony, fundraiser, and finalists reading!
REGISTER HERE!

Things kick off at 5:30 pm Eastern with a finalists reading hosted by Ophira Eisenberg. Then stay tuned for our virtual awards ceremony at 7:00 pm Eastern. We’ll be honoring Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing winner Merve Emre, Toni Morrison Achievement Award winner Cave Canem Foundation, and Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award winner Percival Everett, and revealing the winners of the NBCC Awards in seven categories.
REGISTER BY CLICKING HERE!

REGISTER: The Critic As Artist Panel Followed by 2021 NBCC Award Announcements
2022-01-20 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
January 20, 2022. 7 pm EST
Please join President David Varno and the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors for a virtual panel celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing followed by the announcement of the Balakian award by 2015 winner Carlos Lozada and of the finalists for our 2021 awards by previous winners Morgan Parker (Poetry) and Patrick Radden Keefe (Nonfiction). You can register for this free event here.

The Critic As Artist: What We’ve Learned in 30 years of Reviewing
How have critical standards shifted in the past three decades? What considerations must a reviewer include in an assessment of a book? How has the craft of criticism evolved? A conversation among winners of NBCC’s Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing, first awarded in 1991, moderated by NBCC president David Varno.
Jo Livingstone (2020) Critic for The New Republic
Daniel Mendelsohn (2000) Critic for New York Review of Books
Parul Sehgal (2010) Critic for The New Yorker
Katy Waldman (2018) Critic for The New Yorker
Moderated by NBCC President David Varno, fiction editor, Publishers Weekly.
Remarks on Nona Balakian by poet Peter Balakian, her nephew.

The 2021 Award Winners and Announcements:

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Winner announced by Carlos Lozada
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner announced by Jacob M. Appel
Toni Morrison Award
Winner announced by Jacob M. Appel

Finalist announcements for the John Leonard Prize and the Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry awards by Morgan Parker and Patrick Radden Keefe.

About the National Book Critics Circle
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. It was founded in 1974 to encourage and raise the quality of book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to communicate with one another about their professional concerns. It consists of more than 700 active book reviewers, plus approximately 200 student members and supporting friends.
Regular voting membership is open to professional book review editors and book reviewers. Also available are non-voting memberships for those in the publishing field and a non-voting student membership. If you would like to join, please visit www.bookcritics.org.

The Art of Reviewing Literature in Translation
2021-11-21 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York) | Zoom
The National Book Critics Circle is pleased to announce that it will be launching a new prize for work in translation starting with the 2022 publishing year. The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize will honor the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States.
In honor of the new prize, on Sunday, November 21, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time the National Book Critics Circle will hold a panel with literary translators and critics, discussing strategies for book critics reviewing a work in translation.
Register for the free Zoom webinar here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xyU7So79Rb-HSquxm4r2Eg
Panelists include:
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and translator from Chinese. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City.
Emma Ramadan translates books of all genres from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and a Fulbright for her work. Her recent translations include Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and Anne Garréta’s In Concrete.
Samuel Martin is a co-editor of Hopscotch Translation and teaches French at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated works by several contemporary writers including Jean-Christophe Bailly and Georges Didi-Huberman; his translation of Didi-Huberman’s photo-essay Bark was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.
Kevin Blankinship is a professor of Arabic at Brigham Young University and a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine. He has written about books and culture for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and more. His translations from Arabic have appeared in academic journals as well as ArabLit Quarterly and the Ithra Cultural Center in Saudi Arabia. He tweets as @AmericanMaghreb.
Shelley Frisch’s translations from German, which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka along with many other works of fiction and nonfiction, have been awarded numerous translation prizes, including the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Her translation of Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800, for FSG, will be published in February, and the following month will see publication, by Princeton University Press, of The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka.
Discussion will be moderated Tara Wanda Merrigan, NBCC board member and chair of the NBCC’s Translation Prize Working Group.

Starting a Lit Mag: The NBCC's Adam Dalva in Conversation with Astra Magazine
2021-11-18 20:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
On Thursday, November 18th at 8 PM EST, Adam Dalva will moderate a conversation with the team of a new forthcoming magazine, Astra Magazine. Editor-in-Chief Nadja Spiegelman (former web editor of the Paris Review), Deputy Editor Sam Rutter, and Poetry Editor Aria Aber will give a behind the scenes look at the work that goes into starting a magazine. They will discuss global literature, the state of literary criticism, and discuss what they hope to achieve with Astra Magazine. This is an NBCC members event that will also be open to the public on Zoom.
Register for the free Zoom webinar here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eAFZOlwnTv2sKD2Y3Kd9Eg
Nadja Spiegelman is the author of I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This and several award-winning comics for children. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, The Cut and more. The former online editor of The Paris Review, she is now the editor in chief of Astra Magazine, a new international literary magazine forthcoming in 2022.
Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The White Review and The Paris Review, and he is a regular contributor to ARTNews and T Magazine. He is the Deputy Editor of Astra Magazine
Aria Aber is based in Berkeley, CA. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review and elsewhere. She is the author of Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. She is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is the Books Editor for Words Without Borders. He teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University.
Photo credit for Nadja Spiegelman: Bek Andersen

Litquake Event: Alternative Histories
2021-10-12 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District
Co-presented by The National Book Critics Circle
Join author Ricco Villanueva Siasoco in a conversation with three debut novelists about the process of building alternative histories of the American West, from the Gold Rush through World War I. Patty Enrado’s A Village in the Fields highlights a compelling but buried piece of American history: the Filipino-American contribution to the farm labor movement; Rishi Reddi’s epic Passage West, Los Angeles Times’ Best California Book of 2020, explores a Punjabi sharecropper family in California during World War I, as they work and live alongside their Mexican in-laws and Japanese neighbors; while Tom Lin’s debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, transforms the genre of the Western in a story of revenge for forced labor in the American railroad’s expansion. FREE, $5-10 suggested donation (pre-registration required). Register here.
This program is indoors. Mask and proof of vaccination are required at the door. Please read the requirements at litquake.org/covid.
Browse Litquake’s bookstore here — https://bookshop.org/shop/litquake

Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends Event
2021-09-29 19:30 - 20:30 (America/New_York) | The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
When: Wednesday, September 29 from 7:30 to 8:30pm
Where: The Center For Fiction, auditorium
Proof of vaccination and masks required
Join the National Book Critics Circle for an evening of readings from John Leonard Prize for Best First Book finalists/winners Raven Leilani, Julia Phillips, and Brandon Taylor, hosted by Maris Kreizman. We’ll see you IRL* to celebrate the resiliency of New York City’s literary community. *Proof of vaccination and masks required.
Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.
Julia Phillips is the debut author of the internationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and lives in Brooklyn.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.
Maris Kreizman is the host of the literary podcast The Maris Review. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, and more. She’s the VP of Awards for the National Book Critics Circle.
Proof of full vaccination is required at check-in to attend this event in person. Mask wearing is also required throughout the building. Accepted vaccination proofs include:

your CDC vaccination card (or an image of it)
your Excelsior pass (or a printout of it)
a record of vaccination from the healthcare provider who gave you your vaccine

If you remain unvaccinated because of a disability or sincerely held religious belief, please contact us at health@centerforfiction.org for assistance or to request a reasonable accommodation.

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2021 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

NBCC Conversations: Institutional Inequities
2021-09-22 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
A 40-minute conversation and a 20-minute moderator-led Q&A between Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (The Disordered Cosmos, 2021), Nicole Chung (All You Can Ever Know, 2019 Finalist for NBCC Award for Autobiography), Lacy M. Johnson (The Reckonings, 2018 Finalist for NBCC Award for Criticism). Moderator: Ruben Quesada, NBCC Vice President, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Free. 7:00 pm Eastern. Register for this event here.

Montana Book Festival: Mining Violence: Writing The Contemporary West
2021-09-16 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Phoenix)
Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021, 1:00 pm Mountain Time
The Montana Book Festival and the National Book Critics Circle are hosting a conversation with Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Kristiana Kahakauwila about how the history (read: violence) of the American West is mined in order to write contemporary literature toward and about the region today. NBCC board member and poet Keetje Kuipers will moderate.
Register for this virtual event here.
This event is proudly sponsored by Arts Missoula and will be recorded by Missoula Access Community Television as part of a Media Assistance Grant donated to the Montana Book Festival by MCAT.
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, in Montana. He is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds (W. W. Norton, April 2021). Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (W. W. Norton, 2015), won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.
Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai’i and was named a 2013 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

The Guild Literary Complex and the National Book Critics Circle at the Printers Row Lit Fest
2021-09-11 16:30 - 17:30 (America/Chicago)
The Guild Literary Complex and the National Book Critics Circle present: Exhibit B No. 8 – Sept. 11 at 4:30 p.m. CDT.

Exhibit B is an experimental performance series featuring accessible, multimodal art by diverse, community-conscious artists in Chicago and beyond. This performance—the collective’s eighth—will be at Printer’s Row Lit Fest and feature performances by Ignatius Valentine Aloysius, Sky Goodman, Mojdeh Stoakley, NBCC Board Member Ruben Quesada, and Nicholas Ward. Hosted by NBCC Board Member J. Howard Rosier.

The Guild Literary Complex and the National Book Critics Circle present: Exhibit B No. 8
Sept. 11, 2021
Printers Row Lit Fest
AWM/Feinberg Stage
632 S. Dearborn, Chicago, IL 60605
4:30 p.m. CDT

Racial Consciousness in Literary Criticism
2021-07-15 20:00 (America/New_York)
(L-R): David Mura, Lisa Teasley, Myriam Gurba, Erik Gleibermann
Just as astute fiction writers build their racial awareness to portray racial realities outside their own, discerning literary critics can develop such awareness to review books with unfamiliar racial experience. How can critics deepen understanding of an author’s racially-informed artistic tradition? Should critics seek editorial guidance to identify potential racial blind spots? This diverse panel brings together critics, editors and creative writers to explore these and other questions. The conversation will be moderated by Erik Gleibermann and the panelists are David Mura, Lisa Teasley, and Myriam Gurba.

Hamnet: A Virtual Afternoon with Maggie O'Farrell and Colette Bancroft
2021-06-13 13:00 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
NBCC Vice President/Secretary Colette Bancroft will be in conversation with Maggie O’Farrell about her novel Hamnet, which won the NBCC Fiction award, at a virtual event sponsored by Books & Books on Sunday, June 13, at 1:00 pm Eastern. You can register for this free event here.

NBCC Awards Ceremony
2021-03-25 19:00 (America/Chicago) | Wildbound Live
In partnership with the New School Creative Writing program and others, and produced by Wildbound Live.
View the programs for the readings of finalists and the awards ceremony, and watch the show here.

AWP: Edwidge Danticat and Sarah M. Broom on Finding Home
2021-03-05 21:00 - 22:00 (America/New_York)
Two National Book Critics Circle award winning writers, Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat and New Orleanian native Sarah M. Broom, read from their work and engage in a conversation about finding home, their inspiration, research, evolving forms, the unique challenges of writing in these times, and the imaginative process that shapes their originality, what awards mean to writers. Consider this a double masterclass in the art of storytelling.

Sarah Broom
Edwidge Danticat
Jane Ciabattari, Introduction
Marion Winik, Moderator

Sarah Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, and O Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for her memoir, The Yellow House. A native New Orleanian, she received her Master of Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in Harlem.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; Create Dangerously; Claire of the Sea Light; the memoir Brother, I’m Dying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography; and the story collection Everything Inside, which won the NBCC’s fiction award. She also is the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize and the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award.
Jane Ciabattari is the National Book Critics Circle VP/Awards & Events (and a former National Book Critics Circle president), the author of the story collection Stealing the Fire, a regular contributor to BBC Culture and Lit Hub, and a member of the Writers Grotto. She serves on the advisory boards of The Story Prize, Bay Area Book Festival, and Lit Camp, and is a Pushcart Prize contributing editor.
A University of Baltimore professor, Marion Winik serves on the National Book Critics Circle Board. She is the author of The Big Book of the Dead, winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her nine other books are New York Times Notable First Comes Love (1996) and Above Us Only Sky (2020). Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR.
Register at AWP.

NBCC Celebrates 2019 Awards & Announces 2020 Finalists
2021-01-24 19:00 (America/New_York) | Wildbound Live
On January 24, the National Book Critics Circle held its first ever virtual awards ceremony, honoring the 2019 award winners. Directly after the ceremony, committee chairs announced the finalists for publishing year 2020.
The event was produced by Wildbound Live. Stream it now via Crowdcast.

Co-sponsored by The New School Creative Writing Program.
Produced by Wildbound and Jane Ciabattari
Filming by David Varno, Kate Belew, Megan Labrise
Additional graphics by Shannon McKenna
With support from
Amazon Literary Partnership 2020 grant
With collaboration from
Luis Jaramillo and Lori Lynn Turner, The New School Creative Writing Program
Cherilyn Parsons and Scott Gelfand, Bay Area Book Festival
Karen Long, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
Boston Book Festival

Brooklyn Book Festival
Steve Wasserman, Heyday Books
Kentucky Book Festival
Twin Cities Book Festival
Virginia Festival for the Book
With special thanks to Fantastic Negrito, two-time Grammy award winner, for permission to use “I’m So Happy I Cry” from his 2020 Grammy-nominated album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet.
Credits: “I’m So Happy I Cry” (Featuring Tarriona “Tank” Ball from Tank & The Bangas)
Music and Lyrics written by Fantastic Negrito – verse written by Tank. Songwriter and Producer,Rhythm Guitar, Lead Vocals and Background Vocals (with Tarriona “Tank” Ball), Percussion, Xavier Dphrepaulezz. Lead guitar Masa Kohama. Bass guitar, Cornelius Mims. Hammond B3 organ, Lionel Holoman Jr.Recorded at Blackball Universe.
Photo credits: Marisol Diaz, John Midgley, Beowulf Sheehan

Tucson Festival of Books, the Art of Book Reviewing
2020-03-15 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York)
Tucson Festival of Books, the Art of Book Reviewing.
Some writers wear many hats. Hear from authors who also work as editors, reviewers, and publishers. A panel discussion hosted by NBCC board member Mark Athitakis, with Gregory McNamee, Brandon Taylor, and Barbara VanDenburgh. Sunday, March 15, 10 a.m., University of Tucson.
UPDATE: This event has been canceled due to concerns about the coronavirus.

Annual NBCC Membership Meeting [canceled]
2020-03-13 10:00 - 11:30 (America/New_York)
This event has been canceled. Please direct any questions to lhertzel@bookcritics.org or mwinik@ubalt.edu.

Awards Announcement [online March 12] and Gala Fundraiser [Sept. 2020]
2020-03-12 18:30 (America/New_York)
The NBCC Awards will be announced online March 12 at 7 p.m. Eastern.
The annual gala fundraiser will be rescheduled for September. Please direct any questions to lhertzel@bookcritics.org or mwinik@ubalt.edu.

The Annual Finalist Reading [canceled]
2020-03-11 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)

AWP2020 NBCC Featured Reading with Louise Erdrich and Alice McDermott
2020-03-06 15:20 - 16:35 (America/New_York)
A reading and conversation with novelists Louise Erdrich (NBCC fiction awards for Love Medicine and LaRose, launching The Night Watchman) and Alice McDermott (NBCC fiction finalist for Someone and The Ninth Hour, National Book Award for Charming Billy). Moderated by former NBCC President Kate Tuttle. Introductions by former NBCC President Jane Ciabattari.

Visit Booth 1455 to meet NBCC members and board members and sign up for membership, including “Friend of” and Student memberships and to learn about our new Emerging Critics program and 2019 awards.

HemisFair Ballroom C3, Henry B. González Center, Ballroom Level. San Antonio, TX
