For the first time in the National Book Awards’ 65-year history, a cartoonist is being honored in an adult category as a finalist.

The National Book Foundation on Wednesday announced that Roz Chast, a staff cartoonist at the New Yorker, is among the five nonfiction finalists to make the cut less than a month after the longlists were released for the awards’ four categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry and young people’s literature.

Chast’s memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is joined in the nonfiction category by John Lahr for his biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China and two-time Pulitzer winner Edward O Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence.

The fiction category is stacked with newcomers, with the exception of Marilynne Robinson, a two-time finalist and Pulitzer prize winner, who is nominated for Lila. The other finalists are former US marine Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

The poetry nominees are Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, Fanny Howe’s Second Childhood, Maureen N McLane’s This Blue, Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. All finalists are first-time nominees except for Glück, who has been nominated three times and won the Pulitzer prize in 1993.

Each of the finalists for young people’s literature has been honored by the National Book Foundation before. Four of the nominees have been on the finalist list before, and the fifth, John Corey Whaley, received a Five Under 35 Honor in 2011 for his debut Where Things Come Back. He’s nominated for his book Noggin. The other finalists this year are: Eliot Schrefer’s Threatened, Steve Sheinkin’s The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights, Deborah Wiles’ Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming.

Winners are announced on 19 November in New York City at an event emceed by Daniel Handler – also known as Lemony Snicket. Winners receive $10,000 and, inevitably, a bump in sales.

The medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is being presented to Ursula K Le Guin and the Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community is being presented to Kyle Zimmer, co-founder, CEO and president of the non-profit First Book.