-Funding for the Ideastream Public Media production of the 89th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards was provided by the Cleveland Foundation.

♪♪ -Every story has a setting.

It could be set in a home that feels comfortable and safe... -The land, the aina, is sacred.

-...it could be rooted in the place where you face your toughest challenges... -I always thought quite a bit about what this idea of home was.

-...or your story may be told in the special spaces that harbor growth and prosperity.

-So I was there during this period, and I started thinking, "What is this all about?"

-Welcome to the 89th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the only juried American book prize dedicated to works that address racism and diversity.

In this show, we'll take you to the places that shape the lives and work of this year's prize winners.

♪♪ Hello.

And thank you for joining us.

I'm Natasha Trethewey, the chair of this prestigious book prize.

I'm proud to be in Cleveland, the birthplace of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Cleveland native Edith Anisfield Wolf created the awards in 1935 to celebrate writers who fight racism, champion representation, and shine a light on humanity's vast diversity.

I'm in the Special Collections section of the Cleveland Public Library.

Behind me is the Treasure Room, which contains every book that has been awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Prize over its nine decades.

Across town, at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, the winners were honored in a moving ceremony.

[ Applause ] ♪♪ From the home of the book awards, we set off for island life to meet our Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

A daughter of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston was born and raised in Northern California, where she lives today.

Telling cultural and family stories made her a literary icon.

She paved the way for women writers, Asian-American writers, and writers who have stories that are often unconventional to many Americans.

She raised her family in a tropical setting, a place that keeps pulling her back.

♪♪ -You know, Hawaii... [Laughing] Oh, it's... ♪♪ Hawaii has so many traditions and culture that, uh -- that feel so right to me.

The Hawaiian culture has a lot in common with the Chinese culture.

Hawaiians understand that the land, the aina, is sacred.

-I love Hawaii!

♪♪ I like to be called Hana, but my name is Hana Mei.

-Do you know that your name is Japanese and Chinese... -Yeah, I already know that.

-...and Hawaiian?

Yeah.

And why do you call me "Baba"?

Do you remember why you call me "Baba"?

-Because that's how you say "grandma" in Japanese.

-Yeah, it's obaasan, right?

Obaasan.

-Yeah, but I say "Baba" for short.

-Yeah.

-Puppy!

[ Singing indistinctly ] ♪♪ -Why don't we sit together on the swing?

-[ Scoffs ] That's even more embarrassing.

-It's that embarrassing?

Okay, okay.

♪♪ There is a version of this book that, on the front page, it says "nonfiction" and on the back it says "fiction."

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ The publishers and everybody, they'd get all mixed up about what I'm doing 'cause I'm talking about ghosts, you know?

At the beginning, it was a lot of misunderstanding.

"Oh, this is -- this is exotic Chinese stuff.

This is what they do in China.

And she's a Chinese writer."

And, uh, in a way, it's dismissing the relevance to America.

It finally got the understanding that it needed, but it took many years.

I thought to myself, I'm not going to let any publishers or -- be breathing down my shoulder saying, you know, "That doesn't work.

That doesn't work."

Uh, I just...

I was very focused on the way I felt and the way I thought.

♪♪ This is the first time anybody's asked me to answer those critics, and I'm trying to think.

I'm trying to say something nice.

We get this criticism that we are writing against our own men, that we are saying that Chinese men are wimps or that Black men abuse their women.

Uh, we are writing feminist books, and so we have to make these charges against the men that were attacking us.

Okay, then there's another one about, "You got the myths all wrong.

You got the old stories wrong."

Okay, what I'm doing, I feel, is there were ancient myths, and, uh, they were passed on orally.

When you tell oral stories, when you talk story, they change.

When you talk to each person, you tell the story that that person needs to hear with.

With this kind of criticism for -- about not being a "true Chinese-American," uh, that was very hurtful for me.

As for those critics who, uh -- who really attacked me personally -- It was not a literary criticism.

It's a personal attack.

And -- And what I want to say to them now is... you just wasted all your energy with that anger and attacking me.

You just use it for your own art, and -- and you'll be fine.

[ Laughs ] -♪ So live your life ♪ -♪ Hey ♪ -♪ Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay ♪ ♪ You steady chasin' that paper, just live your life ♪ -♪ Ohh ♪ -♪ Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay ♪ ♪ Ain't got no time for no haters, just live your life ♪ -♪ Your life, your life ♪ -My mother said to me, "Don't tell anybody what I am about to tell you."

The, "Uh-oh.

I can't tell anybody anything."

I want to write these stories, but my mother said, "Don't tell.

These are family secrets."

"My mother did pause at the door.

She sat with the lamp beside her and stared at her yellow and black reflection in the night glass.

There it sat.

It breathed airlessly, pressing her, sapping her.

'Oh, no.

A Sitting Ghost,' she thought.

She could see the knife which was catching the moonlight near the lamp.

Her arm had become an immensity too burdensome to lift.

The ghost spread itself over her arm."

My mother read it, and you know what she said?

"Hey!

This is pretty good!

This is good!"

And I thought, "Whew!"

♪♪ In all my writing, I am preserving my family's history.

I want my stories to live on for generations and forever.

I've also thought I'm 83 years old, and the grandchildren are 4 and 6.

-[ Exclaims ] -Are they going to remember me?

If I spend a lot of time on the mainland and I come to Hawaii once in a while, they'll forget me.

And then I remember...

I've got these books.

-I'll never forget you, Grammy.

-Oh.

That's good.

I'm never going to forget you, either.

-Even though you're dead?

-Even when I'm dead, yes.

-We head back to the mainland all the way to the East Coast to meet our winner for Nonfiction, Ned Blackhawk's "The Rediscovery of America" retells the early days of United States history with Native Americans at the center.

Their role in shaping this country is often documented with a distorted view or simply ignored.

Blackhawk grew up in Detroit as what he calls an urban Indian.

Now he teaches at Yale University.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It was a -- It was a flophouse before they turned it into this, the university.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] Yeah, how'd it turn out?

Yeah.

I've really enjoyed working at Yale and helping build a community of Native American students and scholars and graduate students interested in these areas.

-That would be amazing.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -For me, one of the exciting draws about teaching here in New England is the proximity to Canada.

The really kind of formative experience for me, like many, occurred as an undergraduate.

I lived in Montreal during a period of incredible Indigenous political activism.

So I was there during this period, and I started thinking, "What is this all about?

Why did I not know anything about these communities before I came here?

Why don't I learn -- Why haven't I learned really anything about these communities back in Michigan?

Why have I never really been exposed to the history of my own tribe in any kind of formal academic setting?"

And after I was educated in Canada, I decided I wanted to become a Native American historian.

And then I left Montreal for Los Angeles, where I enrolled in the graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles.

And it was there that I encountered this incredibly rich and diverse community of professors and graduate students interested in new visions of American history, because it exposed to me a world of people who were actually remaking American history in ways that I felt were needed.

♪♪ My university at the time had a Indian mascot called the Redmen, and I was a member of the track team, and so I saw this imagery daily.

And it was not, I think, very sensitive or appropriate.

So at some point as an undergraduate, I decided to work to get rid of that mascot, which we were successful in doing.

They kept the name, however, for many decades thereafter but have recently in the last five years or so abandoned the term "Redmen" at McGill.

They're called the Redbirds as opposed to the Redmen.

♪♪ I can see how some communities feel proud of mascots that celebrate, say, the Scandinavian communities in Minnesota.

They call themselves the Vikings.

Things of that nature, I think, are less kind of rooted in the histories of injustice that we've been talking about.

The American Psychological Association has adopted formal resolutions based on the scholarship and studies of other Native American psychologists that prove the harmful, detrimental effects that these mascots and imagery have on Native American students.

I was a Native American student.

I was a Native American collegiate athlete.

I understood, elementally, that these were harmful.

They brought my difference into question in ways that I didn't want questioned.

I did not want to be associated with and/or characterized by kind of visions of angry Indian people.

♪♪ ♪♪ The term "Indian" predates the establishment in the United States and is one of the first categories of difference in the lexicon of the Columbian world after 1482, and so we can't move past this history easily.

We have to kind of understand that that term has its history, as well as place.

But the term "Native American" is a little more kind of appropriate because "Indian" doesn't refer to, for example, Indigenous peoples from Alaska or from Hawaii or other American territories where there are other American Indigenous communities.

So "Native American" or "Native" are kind of, uh, inclusive terms that can incorporate Alaska Native peoples, Native Hawaiians, Polynesians, as well as Native Americans themselves.

"Indigenous" refers to, you know, uh, over several hundred million people globally who identify, who are part of Indigenous communities across the globe.

And within Native American communities, obviously, we heavily emphasize our tribal distinctiveness.

So we should understand as best we can not just the Native American background of our fellow citizens, but, as best we can, the tribal distinctiveness, in part because tribes recognize community members in ways that are essential to their self-governing.

I'm a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada.

♪♪ To teach Native American history comes with a set of, I feel, inherent obligations, some of which are to demystify and not romanticize Native Americans, to humanize and convey the diversity of experiences, not create any kind of uniform or homogenous visions of the subject, but to highlight the diversity, endurance, the survival, the contemporary presence of Native peoples, and try to do so in concert with contemporary Native American perspectives, voices, and even communities.

"Starting in the late 19th century, however, a new generation of Native American leaders emerged, challenging the foundational mythology of America.

Often educated in boarding schools, as well as the U.S. colleges, they hailed from across the continent and had different visions of the United States and its history.

Raised with distinctive cultural practices, kinship networks, and different understandings of the past, they responded to this intellectual formation and sustained in powerful ways.

This generation collectively worked to create an American future that included Native peoples."

If American citizens and leaders, broadly speaking, had more informed understandings of our nation's past, we would be able to remedy the challenges in our society more effectively.

I feel that study and research and inquiry help resolve many of those challenges.

[ Laughter ] -We head to a nearby metropolis to meet our winner for Poetry.

Monica Youn's collection of poems "From From" examines perceptions of racial difference, otherness, and the feeling of perpetual foreignness that is often a painful reality for Asian Americans.

Youn, the daughter of Korean immigrants, grew up in Houston but has found her forever home.

♪♪ -Growing up, I always thought quite a bit about what this idea of home was.

Like, you know, some people would say that my homeland was Korea.

I had never really been to Korea.

Some people would say my home was Houston, Texas.

I was planning on leaving Houston, Texas, as soon as I could.

And people in Houston, Texas, didn't seem to think that I belonged there.

I got to New York, and I was like, "Okay.

This is it.

I feel like I belong here."

-♪ Somewhere, somewhere ♪ ♪ Somewhere in Brooklyn ♪ -Here, it really takes a lot to have a New Yorker look at you funny.

People sometimes say that New Yorkers are unfriendly.

And I say you've got to be kidding.

You can't have this many people living on top of each other and managing to get along without a great degree of generosity and humility and neighborliness.

Everyone kind of belongs here.

There's no one who is out of place in this city.

And that's kind of what I love about it.

-♪ Somewhere in Brooklyn ♪ -Hey, hey, ho, ho!

Racism has got to go!

Hey, hey, ho, ho!

♪♪ [ Indistinct chanting ] ♪♪ -I was really interested in the way that this book ended up becoming very much a book of the pandemic and a book of the anti-Asian hate that followed in the wake of the pandemic.

When you have people screaming anti-Asian epithets and acting threatening toward people trying to enter your apartment building, toward your neighbors, when you are racially harassed multiple times within a couple of blocks of your home, when someone spits at you as you're walking your child to kindergarten... ...it causes you to clench up, to look at people with suspicion rather than with generosity.

And I just really, desperately did not want to become that person.

I was walking to a restaurant that's, you know, two blocks from my apartment.

I go there all -- I used to eat lunch there every day.

And to have some guy just... "Pshoo!

Pshoo!

Pshoo!"

you know, over and over again for a period of just minutes while, you know, 40 white customers of the restaurant just watched and did nothing was really very alienating to me.

♪♪ I was not expecting that in Brooklyn.

To, you know, have that neighborhood turn toxic on you in this way was... uh, startling to me, shocking.

And so I started writing a number of these poems, thinking about the magpie as a symbol.

"And at first, the Westerners were glad in their coming, for the care that the magpies gave to those among them so long uncared for, and therefore the magpies walked proudly among them.

And then some Westerners hated the magpies and said to the others, 'See how the dark hands and dark mouths of the magpies are ever wet with the blood of their work and their food.

Surely therefore these magpies are unclean in their ways and therefore we should not suffer them among us.

And then a sickness came upon the land, and many died among the Westerners and also among the magpies, and those who were sick were cared for by the magpies.

And still some Westerners hated the magpies and said to the others, 'Surely this sickness came to our lands with the coming of the magpies.'

And then some Westerners hunted the magpies."

♪♪ -The FBI is now investigating a shooting spree that left eight people dead at multiple massage parlors in the Atlanta area.

-These victims were mothers, grandmothers.

-Killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women.

-The position of racism against Asian American females gets erased because often a sexual, uh -- sexual interest, I guess you could say, uh, is part and parcel of that, as if you could not be sexually attracted to something that you hated and despised.

That was clearly the mindset of the shooter in the Atlanta shootings, that he was thinking of these women as inhuman and disposable, and the fact that sex was mixed up in it doesn't mean that he wasn't racist.

It means that his racism was also sexualized.

♪♪ The title of the book comes from a question that pretty much all racialized Americans get and maybe particularly Asian Americans get it pretty often, which is, "Where are you from?"

And then you answer, and then they say, "No, where are you from from?"

As if your first answer, which had been Texas or whatever, was incorrect.

And I started thinking a little bit about this question.

And, you know, what does it mean to be from from?

Like, not to be from Korea, not to be from Houston, Texas, but to be from this kind of place that's in between.

Like, what it means to come from a place of unbelonging.

♪♪ The root of "race" is "root."

So "Deracinations" is uprooted-ness.

And uprooted-ness is kind of what I felt like I had been experiencing my whole life.

I've never had a sense of unquestioned belonging.

I grew up really feeling like I couldn't authentically perform either of those cultures, and I wasn't particularly good at acting Korean.

I wasn't particularly good at acting Texan.

♪♪ I feel really good about young people who are Korean American coming up to me and saying that they related to what I was saying.

"Why do my own people feel foreign to me?"

I'm not saying that that's a good or a bad thing, but I'm saying that it's an experience that deserves to have its own name.

And to the extent that this book helps name and recognize that experience, I think it is helpful to people, and I would want it to be helpful.

♪♪ -Alright!

Let's hear it for our 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners!

[ Cheers and applause ] -Their works shed light on this nation's struggle with racism.

Their stories stand for equality, welcoming everyone, wherever they may be.

-♪ And I think to myself ♪ ♪ What a wonderful world ♪ ♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh-ooh ♪ -Funding for the Ideastream Public Media production of the 89th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards was provided by the Cleveland Foundation.