For more than 40 years, the Before Columbus Foundation has reckoned with the West by embracing the diversity the region represents. The foundation’s annual American Book Awards celebrate the work of writers typically overlooked—at least initially—by the East Coast literary establishment.
“We’re the first literary organization that rivals those on the East Coast,” says writer Ishmael Reed, one of Before Columbus’s cofounders. Before Columbus’s board of directors includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two MacArthur Fellows, three U.S. poet laureates, and one Booker Prize winner. Among last year’s 16 award recipients were Kelly Lytle Hernández for Bad Mexicans, Bojan Louis for Sinking Bell, and Leila Mottley for Nightcrawling. Reed decries the myopic view of eastern literary institutions that too often ignore Latinx, Hispanic, and Indigenous writers. “They get very vague when they get beyond the Rockies,” he says.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Reed and poet Victor Hernández Cruz created the foundation in 1976 after reading the provocative They Came Before Columbus, by Guyana-born scholar Ivan Van Sertima. The book made a case for an African presence in ancient Mexico long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Though widely dismissed by historians, the idea of such early contact excited and further fueled the creativity of many Black artists and intellectuals following the civil rights movement. To envision their forebears in the Americas prior to the devastations of colonization, especially the slave trade, was a liberating leap of imagination.
Reed often speaks of the Before Columbus Foundation as being part of a movement toward inclusivity and multicultural awareness. His and Cruz’s original plan was to distribute—with the help of a modest grant from the Ford Foundation—magazines and other publications from developing nations. In the following years, however, their mission to support writers of all ethnic backgrounds and literary traditions came into sharper focus, and in 1978 they created the American Book Awards.
Based in Oakland, the foundation and its awards—which confer no cash—continue to uplift writers and grow in prestige. Author Kali Fajardo-Anstine, who received an American Book Award for Sabrina and Corina in 2020, recalls learning of the prize while working at a Denver bookstore as a teenager: “I remember shelving books and seeing an emblem that marked American Book Award winners. I saw that it was an important book award and that it was doing something different. I started recognizing that they were awarding writers from a wider swath.” The book was This Bridge Called My Back, by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, which was honored in 1986 and went on to become a foundational Chicana feminist text. Fajardo-Anstine points out that Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street won an award in 1985 but wasn’t acknowledged as a classic until years later. Fajardo-Anstine’s own Sabrina and Corina is now in its ninth paperback printing.
As the awards’ name suggests, recipients mostly come from across the United States. Last year, in addition to several writers from California and the West, honors went to the likes of Florida native Edgar Gomez for his debut memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, and Massachusetts’s Everett Hoagland for The Ways: Poems of Affirmation, Remembrance, Reflection and Wonder. Notably, though, London-based Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, from Trinidad and Tobago, was recognized for her debut novel, When We Were Birds. Also honored was Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was detained and tortured by Israel one month after receiving an award for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza.
After nearly five decades, Reed hopes that Before Columbus and its American Book Awards continue to strengthen the entire publishing ecosystem. The announcement of 2024’s winners is slated for October.
“The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive,” Reed says, adding that he has always considered “the term multicultural to be not a description of various categories, groups, or special interests but rather as the definition of all of American literature.”•
Carribean Fragoza is a writer and artist from South El Monte, California. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including BOMB, Aperture, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 by Rutgers University Press and Senior Writer at the Tropics of Meta. Her first book of fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You (City Lights) was published in 2021. Fragoza currently co-edits UC Press's acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and is also the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Fragoza is the Coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University, and she lives in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County.
