The MELUS Book Award Committee—Fred L. Gardaphé (chair), Amy Gore, Gary Totten, and Wenying Xu—is pleased to announce the winners of the first biennial MELUS Book Award.
The competition was open to academic monographs, published during the 2023-2024 period, that aligned with the mission of MELUS as articulated in its Constitution, and primarily focused on multiple ethnicities, comparative ethnicities, or mixed identities. (No edited collections, anthologies, or creative writing were considered.) The monograph had to be single-authored or co-authored, and published by a university or trade press. Eligible books focused on literature, culture, rhetoric, theory, or biography and contained a significant literary component or clear applicability to ethnic literary study.
The prize will be awarded at the 2026 MELUS conference (Thursday, April 30 – Saturday, May 2, 2026) in Austin, Texas.
Winner:
Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia UP, 2024)
Honorable Mention:
Glenda R. Carpio, Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (Columbia UP, 2023)
Short List:
Christopher T. Fan, Asian American Fiction after 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia UP, 2024)
Ryan Sharp, Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (U of North Carolina P, 2024)
Cristina Stanciu, The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in
American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924 (Yale UP, 2023)
Roberta Wolfson, Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State (Ohio State UP, 2024)