Nickel Boys, The

In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's divergent books complicate overarching categorization, they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it.

From Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead to Rebecca Walker and Hilton Als, these authors are not "emerging" but have already arrived. They are National Book Award finalists and winners of the National Poetry Series and the Pushcart Prize.

This open access book examines how selected African American authors--Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Sherri L. Smith, and N.K. Jemisin--narrate relationships between emotion, race, and space.