Plaza Branch and Central Library will open late at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17 due to the Kansas City Marathon.
Maya Angelou Book Award Winners
2026 Maya Angelou Book Award Short List Announced
- Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma is a literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa.
- The Disappearers by Marlon James tells the story of a group of gay men in 1980s Jamaica and the tragic consequences after one is murdered.
- Desperate Bodies: Stories by Lydia Mathis depicts the fragility, strength, and unruliness of Black women and girls’ bodies and the power in being honest about their desires.
- Make Your Way Home: Stories is Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories.
- Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World is a portrait of Hawai’i and a powerful meditation on family, queer love, and community amid imperialism and environmental collapse.
Past Winners
2025 | Poetry
Black Bell is a collection that ruminates on themes of history, resistance, and liberation with ambitious, inventive imagery and sound.
2024 | Fiction
Witness: Stories is a short story collection set in New York City that follows narratives of actions taken and not taken.
2023 | Poetry
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times explores a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood, inspired by the film, The Wiz. Byas is a Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
2022 | Fiction
An Ordinary Wonder is about a Nigerian boy’s secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl, “highlights the limiting dangers of the gender binary, while also reminding us of the power storytelling has to help us envision a more expansive and inclusive world.”
2021 | Poetry
Moving between English and Arabic, The Wild Fox of Yemen examines the life of a young Muslim woman in New York, half a world away from her roots in Yemen. Almontaser describes it as a love letter to her home country and the people of Yemen.