Jesmyn Ward, Kevin Young win Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

Author Jesmyn Ward has racked up another literary honor.

Ward’s third novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. The awards, given by the Cleveland Foundation in Ohio, were announced Thursday night by Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James, himself an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner in 2015. The annual awards, given since 1935, recognize “literature that confronts racism and explores diversity.”

“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” published by Scribner last fall, won the National Book Award in November. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a contender for the PEN/Faulkner Award in May. Set on the Gulf coast of Mississippi, the novel confronts the ghosts of history and racism through the story of one family challenged by addiction and incarceration. Ward is also the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant.”

The nonfiction award will go to Kevin Young for “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News” (Graywolf), which examines the singular role of race in the history of American hoaxes.

The poetry award went to Shane McCrae for his collection “In the Language of My Captor” (Wesleyan). A lifetime achievement award will be given to American Indian poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday, whose debut novel, “House Made of Dawn,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

The Anisfield-Wolf winners are selected by a jury led by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. The other judges are poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker and historian Simon Schama. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Cleveland on Sept. 27. Past winners include Louise Erdrich, Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Colson Whitehead.