Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards announce 2021 winners Anne Nickoloff, cleveland.com CLEVELAND, Ohio — The five winners of the 86th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were announced on Monday, April 5. Poet Victoria Chang, fiction writers James McBride and Samuel R. Delany, and nonfiction writers Vincent Brown and Natasha Tretheway all earned awards this year. The five winners will be honored in October, during the sixth annual Cleveland Book Week, according to a press release. “The new Anisfield-Wolf winners bring us fresh insights on race and the human condition,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., who chairs the jury, in a press release. “This year, we honor a brilliant military history, a breakout poetry collection that wrestles with mortality, a novel bursting with love and trouble centered around a Brooklyn church, and a memoir by a daughter reclaiming her mother’s story. All of which is capped by the lifetime achievement of Samuel R. Delany, who has broadened our humanity and sharpened our minds through his groundbreaking science fiction.”