The Asterisk*

The Asterisk*

The Asterisk* is a production of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBA), the only juried prize to honor outstanding books that further our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. An asterisk is a reference mark, indicating an omission. With that definition in mind, each episode will delve into some of the holes in our knowledge about an esteemed AWBA winning book.The Asterisk* is hosted by Karen R. Long, the manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Long came to the Cleveland Foundation in 2013 after eight years as book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. She continues as a literary critic and served until 2016 as a vice president for the National Book Critics Circle.For over 85 years, the distinguished books earning Anisfield-Wolf prizes have opened and challenged generations of minds. Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book prizes in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for social justice. Today it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. Past winners have expanded the humanities, illuminated the extraordinary art and culture of peoples around the world and broadened our understanding of rights and identities as well as our sense of whom is entitled to them. The Cleveland Foundation, the world’s first community foundation, has administered the Anisfield-Wolf prize since 1963.

Episodes

Karan Mahajan (2017 Fiction)

October 26, 2023 • 35 mins
Born in Stamford, Conn., Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, where as a young teenager he covered cricket for an international sports network. His second novel, “The Association of Small Bombs,” won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2017 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Its chapter zero describes a 1996 car bomb blast in a New Delhi market, and the book becomes, as Elizabeth McCraken calls it, “a brilliant description ...
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Ishmael Reed (2022 Lifetime Achievement)

August 17, 2023 • 44 mins
Born 85 years ago in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ishmael Reed won the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award lifetime achievement prize for his six decades of as a poet, novelist, playwright, lyricist, cartoonist, musician and founder of small presses and publications – doing it all with curiosity, bite, and eventually a global reach. Celebrated as a teacher and for writing such groundbreaking novels “Mumbo Jumbo,” Reed was recognized with a MacAr...
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Tony Marra (2014 Fiction)

July 20, 2023 • 37 mins
Born in Washington, D.C., Tony Marra won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize in fiction for “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” – his first novel that astonished critics with its verve and skill. The story, set in Chechnya, unfolds through the interlocking lives of six characters. And given the war in Ukraine, it remains uncannily topical. Madison Smartt Bell, himself an Anisfield-Wolf winner, wrote “This novel is, among othe...
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Shane McCrae (2018 Poetry)

July 6, 2023 • 33 mins
Shane McCrae won a 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry for “In the Language of My Captor.” A book about freedom told through stories of captivity, the collection features both prose memoir and poems in historical persona. These include a clutch in the voice of Jim Limber, the mixed-race child Jefferson Davis adopted in the final year of the Civil War. Anisfield-Wolf juror Rita Dove lifted up McCrae’s fifth collection of poetr...
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Percival Everett (2022 Fiction)

June 22, 2023 • 31 mins
Percival Everett won a 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction for “The Trees.” The idea for the novel sprung from the traditional song “I Rise Up” and a Lyle Lovett cover of “Ain’t No More Cane” that Everett was listening to before playing a tennis game. At the time, he also happened to be researching lynching. What “The Trees” became, in the estimation of Anisfield-Wolf Juror Joyce Carol Oates, is a profound novel, “easily the ...
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George Makari (2022 Nonfiction)

June 8, 2023 • 39 mins
George Makari won a 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize in nonfiction for his third book, “Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia.” Amid Brexit and election of Donald Trump in 2016, Makari decided to investigate how “we mis-know one another.” Anisfield-Wolf juror Steven Pinker praised “Of Fear and Strangers,” noting, “We see countless books that consider instances of racism. Very few seek to understand it as a phenomenon t...
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Donika Kelly (2022 Poetry)

May 25, 2023 • 44 mins
Donika Kelly won the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize in poetry for her second book, “The Renunciations” – a response to a marriage ending and to remaking meaning from childhood trauma. Born in Los Angeles, Kelly’s first collection, “Bestiary,” received the 2015 Cave Canem prize. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Rita Dove describes “The Renunciations” as “Several mini-sequences are woven throughout; their periodic reappearance – the “Dear ...
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Peter Ho Davies, Redux Edition (2017 Fiction)

May 11, 2023 • 40 mins
Peter Ho Davies, the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for fiction, becomes the first guest to sit down for a second time with The Asterisk*. This time we caught up with him on the heels of the release of his latest novel, “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.” It begins as a mother asks herself, “Abortion has been legal all my life. Why do I feel like a criminal?” Davies grew up in Coventry, England, the son of a Welsh engi...
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Tiya Miles (2022 Nonfiction)

April 27, 2023 • 44 mins
Tiya Miles won a 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize in nonfiction for “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake,” a deep dive into a worn yet priceless cotton sack and the 10 lines of embroidery on it. Miles saw a picture of it, and was moved to seek its history. The sack will be hung in the International African American Museum when it opens in June 2023. Anisfield-Wolf winning historian Annett...
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Mary Morris (2016 Fiction)

August 4, 2022 • 39 mins
Mary Morris won the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize for “The Jazz Palace,” a novel set in her hometown of Chicago during the Jazz Age. The story, which took nearly 20 years of drafting and revising, sings of Prohibition-era Chicago, teaming with clubs and gangsters, experimental music, and new arrivals from the Southern U.S. and Eastern Europe. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Rita Dove praised this work as a foundational novel that giv...
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Laird Hunt (2013 Fiction)

July 21, 2022 • 43 mins
Laird Hunt is a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for “Kind One,” a haunting novel that explores a horrible and uncanny intimacy between slave and master, inspired by a passage in Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World.” Hunt’s story, which also was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells of two sisters who turn tables on their mistress and take her captive after her Kentucky farmer husband dies. Booker Prize winne...
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Vincent Brown (2021 Nonfiction)

July 7, 2022 • 43 mins
Vincent Brown is a 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War.” It is a groundbreaking investigation into the roots, combatants, cartography and reverberations of the largest slave revolt in the 18th Century British Atlantic World.  “This is truly a remarkable and important event in the history of the world, largely unknown (I confess that I was ignorant of it),” writes Anisfield-...
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Natasha Trethewey (2021 Nonfiction)

June 23, 2022 • 41 mins
Natasha Trethewey, a 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for her searing and lyrical memoir about her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, joins The Asterisk* to discuss epigraphs and erasure. Trethewey won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007 for “Native Guard” and served as the nation’s 19th poet laureate from 2012-2014. She won the Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction prize for “Memorial Drive.” A-W Juror Simon Schama describes the prose in T...
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A. Van Jordan (2005 Poetry)

June 9, 2022 • 42 mins
A. Van Jordan, a 2005 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for his nonfiction about a thwarted spelling bee contestant, joins The Asterisk* to discuss listening closely, the death of Tamir Rice and the writerly fellowship among A-W honorees. Born in Akron, Ohio, Jordan is a graduate of the Cave Canem Workshop. Now a professor of English at the University of Michigan, Jordan won the Anisfield-Wolf prize for M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. The Virgini...
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Victoria Chang (2021 Poetry)

May 26, 2022 • 42 mins
Victoria Chang, a 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for poetry, joins The Asterisk* to discuss the weather of grief, clarity in writing and her relationship with her ancestors. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Chang’s first two degrees, from the University of Michigan and Harvard University, were in Asian studies. But as her interest in poetry grew, she detoured into earning an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in...
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James McBride (2021 Fiction)

May 12, 2022 • 32 mins
James McBride, the only Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recipient to win for both fiction and nonfiction titles, joins The Asterisk* to discuss his degree in music composition, his mother’s affinity for Barbara Bush and his gift for writing humor. Accomplished in music and wordsmithing, with a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University, McBride landed a permanent berth on college syllabi with “The Color of Water.” He subtitl...
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Tracy K. Smith (2019 Poetry)

April 28, 2022 • 44 mins
Tracy K. Smith, a 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for poetry, joins The Asterisk* to discuss what it means to belong, letters to Abraham Lincoln and her return to Harvard as a professor. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, “Life on Mars.” She also served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2017-19. She grew up in Northern California as the youngest of five child...
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Charles King (2020 Nonfiction)

May 24, 2021 • 43 mins
Charles King, the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for nonfiction, joins The Asterisk* to discuss the importance of practicing empathy, what it’s like being married to an anthropologist, writing his books in the Library of Congress and what American authoritarianism looks like. A first-generation college student, King grew up on a small cattle farm in the Ozark foothills near Springdale, Arkansas. He studied history and philo...
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Marilyn Chin (2015 Poetry)

May 7, 2021 • 37 mins
Marilyn Chin, a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for poetry, joins The Asterisk* to discuss loss, mourning and the importance of speaking grief, the influence of her grandmother, and the longevity of her poetry. Born Mei Ling Chin in Hong Kong, she was five when her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where her father transliterated her name to Marilyn. (He had a crush on Marilyn Monroe.) After graduating from the University o...
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Lillian Faderman (2016 Nonfiction)

April 23, 2021 • 37 mins
Lillian Faderman, the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for nonfiction, joins The Asterisk* to discuss why she started writing, her biography of Harvey Milk and the Supreme Court. She also recommends ways to read to grasp LGBTQ history. A leading scholar of that history, Faderman is celebrated for paying attention to lesbian history and activism. She was born in lower Manhattan, the daughter of a Jewish garment worker who rais...
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