On April 3, the Cleveland Foundation announced the winners of the 88th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the only national juried prize that specifically honors literary works confronting racism and celebrating diversity. The winners were revealed at the Sari Feldman Auditorium of the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s Parma-SnowBranch by Adrian Matejka, a 2014 poetry winner. Fiction winners include Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (Viking), which limns racism in the United States through the story of the triumphant racehorse Lexington, and Lan Samantha Chang’sThe Family Chao (Norton), a humorous retelling of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov featuring Chinese American brothers in small-town Wisconsin whose lives are upended when their father is killed.

The poetry award goes to Saeed Jones’s Alive at the End of the World (Coffee House), which continues the author’s profound plunge into what it means to be Black, male, gay, and Southern as it explores issues of grief and commemoration. In this year’s nonfiction winner, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking), Matthew F. Delmont highlights the contributions made by Black men and women to U.S. military efforts during World War II, after which they returned home to encounter ongoing segregation and racism.

The Lifetime Achievement Award honors legendary journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961 with high school classmate Hamilton Holmes amid considerable turmoil. After joining The New Yorker and becoming the first Black writer for its “Talk of the Town,” she went on to establish the Harlem bureau of the New York Times and also worked for PBS and NPR, where she racked up numerous Emmy and Peabody awards.

The Anisfield-Wolf Awards serve as a measure not just of social justice but of quality writing, counting Nobel Prize winners Ralph J. Bunche, Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Gunnar Myrdal, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott among its ranks. This year’s winners are no exception. Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March, while Chang has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 17 years. Jones is a National Book Critics Circle Award poetry finalist and Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction winner, while Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

Given by the Cleveland Foundation, the world’s first and among its largest community foundations, the awards were established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf. “Her notion that literature can ignite justice is valid nearly 90 years later,” notes Karen R. Long, manager of the book awards at the Cleveland Foundation. “We are proud the newest books tackle the toughest topics and insist on ways forward.”

The Anisfield-Wolf jury is chaired by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, where he is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. Longtime jury members include poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker, and historian Simon Schama. This year’s awards ceremony, which anchors the eighth annual Cleveland Book Week, will take place Thursday, September 28, at the Maltz Performing Arts Center at Case Western Reserve University. For additional information, visit www.Anisfield-Wolf.org.