Longlist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction Announced

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays
McMillan Cottom jumps from Trump rallies to feminine beauty and black womanhood in America in this genre-defiant piece.

Carolyn Forché, What You have Heard is True: a Memoir of Witness and Resistance
In this memoir, poet Forché has an unexpected encounter that leads her to El Salvador, a country on the brink of war. (You can read Paste’s essay on the novel here.)

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
This book breaks down the historical context for Trump’s border wall by breaking down the American psyche. Grandin was previously honored by the National Book Awards as a Finalist for Nonfiction in 2009 for The Empire of Necessity.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Using recently released interviews with Irish Republican Army members, Keefe resolves an infamous disappearance and taps into old cultural wounds in Northern Ireland that haven’t healed since the Troubles.

Iliana Regan, Burn the Place: A Memoir
Regan, a self-taught chef, recounts how she found identity and solace in food while growing up gay in an intolerant town and launched a Michelin-starred career.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Taylor is a scholar of black history and contemporary social justice movements who documents how the end of redlining in the 1960s and 1970s inspired new forms of injustice against low-income black families in the U.S.

David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
In his seventh book, Treuer blends the personal with the cultural, much like Abdurraqib. Heartbeat of Wounded Knee has a hand on the pulse of what it means to be Native American in this country, both historically and in contemporary culture. The book confronts issues Native Americans face such as land seizures, conscription in the U.S. military, and forced assimilation.

Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, Solidarity
Woodfox spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he didn’t commit. With George, he revisits this unthinkable torture and recalls how he and the others in the Angola 3 (three black men held at Louisiana State Penitentiary for supposed murder) survived the longest period of solitary confinement in American history.