Last week, the 2016 National Book Awards were announced. Colson Whitehead's (Doubleday) was honored in the fiction category. Daniel Borzutzky won the poetry award for (Brooklyn Arts Press), and Ibram X. Kendi's (Nation Books) was awarded the nonfiction laurel. In young people's literature, (Top Shelf Productions), a collaboration between Representative John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, was recognized.

Besides their excellence, what these four books have in common is a keen focus on personhood and what that means in America. In his acceptance speech, Whitehead acknowledged our new, shocking political reality, and urged, "Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power."

Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, agrees that creating and consuming art is a crucial way we deal with realities, new and old. "Beyond the election, we've been confronting—for many years, but this year really directly—issues with race in America," she tells me over the phone. "In times like these, you often see that that what people are interested in writing about; these are the stories that people feel are important to tell." Lucas thinks that stories are just a natural part of how we all learn about and engage with the world: "If I think of somebody that would never ordinarily pick up Ibram Kendi's book, Stamped from the Beginning, in the political climate we're in, even if you disagree...having read it opens you up to a different perspective."

In that spirit, we asked the other awardees why making art is important to them.

'The Underground Railroad' by Colson Whitehead

Excerpt

"You would have thought Cora's grandmother cursed, so many times was she sold and swapped and resold over the next few years. Her owners came to ruin with startling frequency. Her first master got swindled by a man who sold a device that cleaned cotton twice as fast as Whitney's gin. The diagrams were convincing, but in the end Ajarry was another asset liquidated by order of the magistrate. She went for two hundred and eighteen dollars in a hasty exchange, a drop in price occasioned by the realities of the local market. Another owner expired from dropsy, whereupon his widow held an estate sale to fund a return to her native Europe, where it was clean. Ajarry spent three months as the property of a Welshman who eventually lost her, three other slaves, and two hogs in a game of whist. And so on.

Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers. Masters and mistresses in degrees of wickedness, estates of disparate means and ambition. Sometimes the planters wanted nothing more than to make a humble living, and then there were men and women who wanted to own the world, as if it were a matter of the proper acreage. Two hundred and forty-eight, two hundred and sixty, two hundred and seventy dollars. Wherever she went it was sugar and indigo, except for a stint folding tobacco leaves for one week before she was sold again. The trader called upon the tobacco plantation looking for slaves of breeding age, preferably with all their teeth and of pliable disposition. She was a woman now. Off she went."

From Whitehead's acceptance speech

"Now the book is out and I would never think I would be standing here, and who knows where we're gonna be a year from now? We're sort of happy in here—outside is the blasted, hell-hole wasteland of Trump-land, which we're going to inhabit, but who knows what's going to happen a year from now? And because I'm still promoting the book people have been like, 'Do you have any words about the election?' And I'm like, 'Not really. I'm sort of stunned.' And then I hit upon something that was making me feel better and I guess it was, I think, hopefully applicable to other folks: Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power. That seems like a good formula, for me, anyway."

'Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America' by Ibram X. Kendi

Excerpt

"Racist ideas have done their job on us. We have a heard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large. I write we for a reason. When I began this book, with a heavy heart for Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd, I must confess that I held quite a few racist ideas. Even though I am an Africana studies historian and have been tutored all my life in egalitarian spaces, I held racist notions of Black inferiority before researching and writing this book. Racist ideas are ideas. Anyone can produce them or consume them, as Stamped from the Beginning's interracial cast of producers and consumers show. anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal. Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people."

What is the importance of art for you—personally and politically?

Ibram X. Kendi: Art is creativity. I can't imagine another more important task for human beings than the task of creation, of art. For me, making art is political. It always has been. It always will be. I am on a mission to create an antiracist world, where racism does not restrain the humanity and thereby the creativity of Black people, of any people. I am on a mission to create the egalitarian space where we can all make art."

'The Performance of Becoming Human' by Daniel Borzutzky

Excerpt

"I live in a body that does not have enough light in it

For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light

Once, I walked around my city on a dying morning and a decomposing body approached me and asked me why I had no light

I knew this decomposing body

All that remained of it were teeth, bits of bone, a hand

It came to me and said: There is no light that comes out of your body

I did know at the time that there should have been light in my body

It's not that I am dead

It's not that I am translucent

It's that you cannot know you need something if you do not know it is missing

Which is not to say that for years I did not ask for this light

Once, I even said to the body I live with: I think I need more light in my body, but I really did not take this seriously as a need, as something I deserved to have"

'Let the Light Shine Out of Darkness' appears in Daniel Borzutzky's The Performance of Becoming Human published by Brooklyn Arts Press in 2016. Used with permission of the author and publisher.

What is the importance of art for you—personally and politically?

Daniel Borzutsky: Writing for me creates a form of political and social memory, a memory that hopefully draws attention to those individuals that power forces try to make invisible. And I've always wanted my writing to urgently address the many types of state and economic violence that we live through, violence that affects individuals in both the US and other countries as well. My writing thinks about what it means to live in a world filled with, among other things, economic exploitation, bureaucratic manipulation, violence towards immigrants, corporate abuse, the destruction of unions and the abandonment of the poor. I don't really know how to write a poetry that is not critical of political and power forces, and this somehow helps me to survive.

'March: Book Three' by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell

Excerpt

What is the importance of art for you—personally and politically?

Nate Powell: The act of creation is an essential part of our beings. On a personal level, it's always been a way for me to clarify my own questions about our existence, and begin the eternal process of actively answering those questions. Socially and politically, art (and specifically narrative art, regardless of medium) provides both lenses and mirrors through which to view the world we share, allowing us to better understand our place in it.

It's easy to feel powerless, particularly when hardship and injustice occurs just out of view, carefully diverted through the shadowplay of social media. Creation helps us all better understand precisely what's important to us, what's worth fighting for, and why. More than anything else, the process of bringing art into the world activates essential discourse and dialogue, encourages a revolution of ideas, and underlines that we're never alone in our concerns or hopes.

Estelle Tang Senior Editor Estelle Tang is the former senior editor of ELLE.com.

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