Erroll McDonald and Penguin Random House Authors To Be Honored at American Book Awards Ceremony
The 2025 American Book Award winners, including eight Penguin Random House authors and our very own Erroll McDonald, Vice President & Executive Editor at Knopf, will be honored at the American Book Awards ceremony on Sunday, October 26, 2025, at 2 p.m. PT, at the Maude Fife Room, Wheeler Hall, Room 315, on the UC Berkeley Campus in Berkeley, California. The event is open to the public.
The American Book Award winners are nominated and selected by a panel of writers, editors, and publishers who also represent the diversity of American literary culture. The Awards were created by the Before Columbus Foundation (BCF) to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to honor literary excellence without limitations or restrictions, recognizing writers of all levels of experience and recognition.
According to the BCF, the organization was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. The Before Columbus Foundation has always employed the term “multicultural” not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as a definition of all American literature. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture-the whole comprises the parts.
Congratulations to the authors, teams, and colleagues on this incredible achievement! To view the full list, click here.
Our 2025 American Book Award Winners:
MARTYR!: A Novel (Knopf)
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
JAMES: A Novel (Doubleday)
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
MALAS: A Novel (Penguin Books)
In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.
THE SMALL AND THE MIGHTY: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, form the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement (Thesis)
In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.
MOTHER (Penguin Books)
mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.
COLORED TELEVISION: A Novel (Riverhead Books)
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
John Edgar Wideman
John Edgar Wideman is the award-winning author of more than 20 books, which have received two PEN/ Faulkner Awards and a National Book Award nomination. In addition to his authorial career, he is a professor at Brown University. His book FEVER is published by Penguin Books.
Editor/Publisher Award
Erroll McDonald, Vice President/Executive Editor, Knopf, Penguin Random House
Erroll McDonald is a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf. Throughout his illustrious, decades-long career, he has published authors such as Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Ngugi wa Thiongo, John Edgar Wideman, Harold Bloom, Fran Lebowitz, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Lucy Sante, Margo Jefferson, Richard Posner, Nina Simone and Richard Pryor.
Kevin Killian, SELECTED AMAZON REVIEWS (Semiotext(e))
A book-length selection from Kevin Killian’s legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com. An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.
