NBF Reveals Final Literature for Justice Titles

The National Book Foundation has announced its selections for the third and final year of its Literature for Justice program. This year, the list includes seven titles that "shed light on mass incarceration in the United States." The three-year LFJ campaign is an effort on behalf of the Foundation to "contextualize the issue of mass incarceration through literature, creating an accessible and thought-provoking collection of books crafted for broad public consumption." The selected books are part of a larger, overarching campaign that now includes 17 titles over the course of the program’s three years. The LFJ titles are distributed by the NBF into prisons and facilities across the country. This year, the distribution will continue through a new partnership with the Million Book Project. 

The reading list, which was selected by a committee of five authors, is as follows:

• Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (McClelland & Stewart)
• Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press) 
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press)
• Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press)
• Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (University of North Carolina Press)
• Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill Books)
• Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, Solitary (Grove)