National Book Award 2020s: A decade of winners
The 2020s have proven to be a transformative era for the National Book Award, with its poetry category becoming a vital forum for voices grappling with displacement, resistance, and the complexities of belonging in uncertain times. From Don Mee Choi’s formally inventive DMZ Colony in 2020—a collection that fragments language itself to capture the Korean peninsula’s fractured history—to the award’s most recent honor given to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living in 2024, the decade has seen the award recognize poets who refuse neat resolutions and easy narratives. The selection reflects a broader literary moment when American poetry turned inward and outward simultaneously, examining what it means to inhabit contested spaces, whether geographic, linguistic, or temporal.
What makes this run particularly striking is the award’s consistent championing of experimental form and migrant consciousness. Martín Espada’s Floaters brought urgent attention to labor and survival, while Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory deployed innovative typography and multilingual registers to interrogate colonialism’s ongoing presence. Even as these poets speak from distinct cultural positions—Korean-American, Puerto Rican, Chamorro—there’s a through-line of formal daring and thematic intensity that suggests the National Book Award’s judges have actively sought work that challenges both literary conventions and readers’ assumptions about who gets to tell America’s story.
Below, explore the full list of this remarkable decade’s winners across all categories, and discover how these five poetry selections fit into the broader landscape of contemporary American letters.
2020
Poetry
DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
2021
Poetry
- Floaters by Martín Espada
2022
Poetry
- Punks: New & Selected Poems by John Keene
2023
Poetry
- from unincorporated territory by Craig Santos Perez
2024
Poetry
- Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha