National Book Awards at Sam Houston State University

Visiting Authors

Angela Flournoy

2015 NBA Finalist, Fiction
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

Angela Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Southern California. She has taught writing at various universities and has worked for the D.C. Public Library. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.

Ada Limón

2015 NBA Finalist, Poetry
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

Ada Limón is the author of three previous collections of poems: Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry, among many other publications. And her essays and articles have been published in Oxford American, Hemispheres Magazine, Guernica, the Poetry Foundation, American Poetry Society, and VIDA. She lives in Kentucky and California.

Reader's Guide

Noelle Stevenson

2015 NBA Finalist, Young People’s Literature
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

Noelle Stevenson has been nominated for a Harvey Award, and was awarded the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Webcomic in 2012 for Nimona. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Noelle is the co-writer of Lumberjanes. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reader's Guide

About the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards

The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.

The National Book Awards are among the most prestigious annual literary awards in our nation. The awards were established in 1950 and the first winners included Nelson Algren in fiction and William Carlos Williams in poetry. In brief, nearly every major American writer of the past sixty years has been honored by the National Book Awards, if not as a winner, then as a finalist.

Since 1996, independent panels of five writers have chosen the National Book Award Winners in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature.

Contact

For more information, contact Dr. Amanda Nowlin-O'Banion, visiting professor of creative writing (nowlin-obanion@shsu.edu or 936.294.4109) or Dr. Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing (kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407).