NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION INC

The National Book Foundation's access and education programs include: Book Rich Environments which infuses public housing communities across the country with an accessible culture of books through distribution of hundreds of thousands of free books each year; BookUp, an after school book club for students in grades 6-12; Teen Press Conference which gives middle and high-school students an opportunity to interact with the finalists for Young People’s literature; and Raising Readers which helps adult caregivers model reading habits for children in their lives.

The National Book Awards is one of the nation’s most prestigious literary accolades. Within a decade of its founding in 1950, the NBAs acknowledged the work of writers such as Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Rachel Carson, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Adrienne Rich, Eudora Welty, and William Carlos Williams—authors who have helped shape the foundation of American literature. This tradition continues, with the NBAs today honoring a diverse community of writers including Elizabeth Acevedo, Robert A. Caro, Masha Gessen, Terrance Hayes, Ibram X. Kendi, László Krasznahorkai, Jacqueline Woodson, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, and Charles Yu, among many others.