The Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, novelist Colson Whitehead and U.S. Rep. John Lewis are among the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards.

Twenty finalists were announced for four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. Longlists for each category had been released in September.

The finalists include Solmaz Sharif, an Oakland poet — born in Turkey to Iranian parents — for her first collection of poetry, “Look.”

Also nominated is Jacqueline Woodson, author of the novel “Another Brooklyn.” She won the 2014 National Book Award for young people’s literature for “Brown Girl Dreaming.”

Several of the titles center on race relations and slavery, among them Whitehead’s bestselling novel “The Underground Railroad,” UC Davis Professor Andrés Reséndez’s “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America,” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas In America.”

Here are the finalists:

FICTION

“The Throwback Special,” by Chris Bachelder (W.W. Norton & Co.)

“News of the World,” by Paulette Jiles (William Morrow)

“The Association of Small Bombs,” by Karan Mahajan (Viking Books)

“The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

“Another Brooklyn,” by Jacqueline Woodson (Amistad)

NONFICTION

“Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press)

“Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books)

“Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press)

“The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America,” by Andrés Reséndez (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon)

POETRY

“The Performance of Becoming Human,” by Daniel Borzutzky (Brooklyn Arts Press)

“Collected Poems 1974-2004,” by Rita Dove (W.W. Norton & Co.)

“Archeophonics,” by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press)

“The Abridged History of Rainfall,” by Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

“Look,” by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

“Raymie Nightingale,” by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick Press)

“March: Book Three,” by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions)

“When the Sea Turned to Silver,” by Grace Lin (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

“Ghost,” by Jason Reynolds (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)

“The Sun Is Also a Star,” by Nicola Yoon (Delacorte Press)

Award winners will be announced Nov. 16.

More information: www.nationalbook.org

John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF