2024 Massachusetts Book Awards - Nonfiction

Kim's previous essay collection, Womanish, which we published in 2019, sold over 3000 copies, and was reviewed in the New York Times, and excerpted in the Washington Post. Blurbs to come from Jerald Walker, whose 2020 collection, How To Make A Slave and Other Essays, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Marita Golden, author of The Strong Black Woman and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Kim teaches at Emerson College and lives...

"Just a few years ago, Schuyler Bailar rose to national and international prominence when he became the first openly transgender athlete to compete on an NCAA Division 1 team in any sport. A top high school prospect, Schuyler had been recruited by Harvard for the women's team, but after taking a gap year to address mental health and ultimately to transition, Schuyler swam instead for Harvard's men's team. Since then, Schuyler has become a go to expert...

"A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract--of our ability to work collectively for the public good--and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever...

"Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing,...

"The awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life traveled billions of miles across billions of years to make us who we are."--

In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled man, with William as "his" slave. Woo follows their journey north, and in joining the abolitionist lecture circuit. When the new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 put them at risk, they fled from the United States. Their...