# National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, established in 1976, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism.
Books previously published in English are not eligible, such as re-issues and paperback editions. They do consider "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories."
The judges are the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely "professional book review editors and book reviewers." Winners of the awards are announced each year at the NBCC awards ceremony in conjunction with the yearly membership meeting, which takes place in March.

## Recipients

National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction winners and finalists :
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1975 | R. W. B. Lewis | Edith Wharton: A Biography | Winner |
| 1976 | Maxine Hong Kingston | The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts | Winner |
| 1976 | George Dangerfield | The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations | Finalist |
| 1976 | Alex Haley | Roots | Finalist |
| 1976 | Irving Howe with Kenneth Libo | World of Our Fathers | Finalist |
| 1976 | Richard Kluger | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality | Finalist |
| 1977 | Walter Jackson Bate | Samuel Johnson | Winner |
| 1977 | Michael Herr | Dispatches | Finalist |
| 1977 | David McCullough | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 | Finalist |
| 1977 | John McPhee | Coming Into the Country | Finalist |
| 1977 | Carl Sagan | The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Finalist |
| 1978 | Maureen Howard | Facts of Life | Winner |
| 1978 | Garry Wills | Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence | Winner |
| 1978 | Barbara W. Tuchman | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Finalist |
| 1978 | Theodore H. White | In Search of History: A Personal Adventure | Finalist |
| 1978 | Barrington Moore | Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt | Finalist |
| 1978 | Sissela Bok | Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life | Finalist |
| 1978 | A. Scott Berg | Max Perkins: Editor of Genius | Finalist |
| 1978 | Alfred Kazin | New York Jew | Finalist |
| 1978 | Anne Hollander | Seeing Through Clothes | Finalist |
| 1978 | Peter Matthiessen | The Snow Leopard | Finalist |
| 1979 | Telford Taylor | Munich: The Price of Peace | Winner |
| 1979 | Tom Wolfe | The Right Stuff | Finalist |
| 1979 | Joan Didion | The White Album | Finalist |
| 1979 | Edward Hoagland | African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan | Finalist |
| 1979 | Douglas Hofstadter | Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain | Finalist |
| 1980 | Ronald Steel | Walter Lippmann and the American Century | Winner |
| 1980 | Jean Strouse | Alice James: A Biography | Finalist |
| 1980 | Maxine Hong Kingston | China Men | Finalist |
| 1980 | John Boswell | Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century | Finalist |
| 1980 | Justin D. Kaplan | Walt Whitman: A Life | Finalist |
| 1981 | Stephen Jay Gould | The Mismeasure of Man | Winner |
| 1981 | James Fallows | National Defense | Finalist |
| 1981 | T.J. Jackson Lears | No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 | Finalist |
| 1981 | Dumas Malone | The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, Volume Six | Finalist |
| 1981 | Erving Goffman | Forms of Talk | Finalist |
| 1982 | Robert Caro | The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Winner |
| 1982 | George F. Kennan | The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age | Finalist |
| 1982 | Jonathan Schell | The Fate of the Earth | Finalist |
| 1982 | Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe | Stolen Lightning | Finalist |
| 1982 | Kate Simon | Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood | Finalist |
| 1983 | Seymour M. Hersh | The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House | Winner |
| 1983 | Roger Rosenblatt | Children of War | Finalist |
| 1983 | William W. Warner | Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman | Finalist |
| 1983 | Theodore Draper | Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente and Other | Finalist |
| 1983 | David S. Landes | Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World | Finalist |
| 1984 | Freeman Dyson | Weapons and Hope | Winner |
| 1984 | David Wyman | The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 | Finalist |
| 1984 | John Edgar Wideman | Brothers and Keepers | Finalist |
| 1984 | Robert Darnton | The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History | Finalist |
| 1984 | Evan Connell | Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn | Finalist |
| 1985 | J. Anthony Lukas | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | Winner |
| 1985 | Tracy Kidder | House | Finalist |
| 1985 | Elaine Scarry | The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World | Finalist |
| 1985 | Alan Riding | Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans | Finalist |
| 1985 | Eva Keuls | The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens | Finalist |
| 1986 | Barry Lopez | Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape | Winner |
| 1986 | Bernard Bailyn | Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution | Finalist |
| 1986 | Jonathan Evan Maslow | Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist’s Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil | Finalist |
| 1986 | John W. Dower | War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | Finalist |
| 1986 | Marc Reisner | Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water | Finalist |
| 1987 | Richard Rhodes | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Winner |
| 1987 | Randy Shilts | And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic | Finalist |
| 1987 | James Miller | Democracy Is in the Streets | Finalist |
| 1987 | Charles Mee | The Genius of the People | Finalist |
| 1987 | Stephen Jay Gould | Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle | Finalist |
| 1988 | Taylor Branch | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 | Winner |
| 1988 | James M. McPherson | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era | Finalist |
| 1988 | Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | Finalist |
| 1988 | Jane Kramer | Europeans | Finalist |
| 1988 | Eric Foner | Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 | Finalist |
| 1989 | Michael Dorris | The Broken Cord | Winner |
| 1989 | Tracy Kidder | Among Schoolchildren | Finalist |
| 1989 | Barbara Ehrenreich | Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class | Finalist |
| 1989 | David Fromkin | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 | Finalist |
| 1989 | Amy Wilentz | The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier | Finalist |
| 1990 | Shelby Steele | The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America | Winner |
| 1990 | Mike Davis | City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles | Finalist |
| 1990 | Alma Guillermoprieto | Samba | Finalist |
| 1990 | O.B. Hardison | Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century | Finalist |
| 1990 | Kevin Phillips | The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath | Finalist |
| 1991 | Susan Faludi | Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women | Winner |
| 1991 | Thomas Geoghegan | Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back | Finalist |
| 1991 | Melissa Fay Greene | Praying for Sheetrock | Finalist |
| 1991 | Jonathan Kozol | Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools | Finalist |
| 1991 | Dennis Overbye | Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe | Finalist |
| 1992 | Norman Maclean | Young Men and Fire | Winner |
| 1992 | Michael D. Coe | Breaking the Maya Code | Finalist |
| 1992 | Donald Katz | Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America | Finalist |
| 1992 | Nancy Scheper-Hughes | Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil | Finalist |
| 1992 | Edward O. Wilson | The Diversity of Life | Finalist |
| 1993 | Alan Lomax | The Land Where the Blues Began | Winner |
| 1993 | Rosemary Mahoney | Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age | Finalist |
| 1993 | George B. Schaller | The Last Panda | Finalist |
| 1993 | Russ Rymer | Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence | Finalist |
| 1993 | David Remnick | Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire | Finalist |
| 1994 | Lynn H. Nicholas | The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War | Winner |
| 1994 | Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson | Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas | Finalist |
| 1994 | Abraham Verghese | My Own Country: A Doctor's Story | Finalist |
| 1994 | Sherwin Nuland | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | Finalist |
| 1994 | John Demos | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | Finalist |
| 1995 | Jonathan Harr | A Civil Action | Winner |
| 1995 | Nicholas Basbanes | A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books | Finalist |
| 1995 | Madeleine Blais | In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle | Finalist |
| 1995 | Fox Butterfield | All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence | Finalist |
| 1995 | Lawrence Weschler | Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder | Finalist |
| 1996 | Jonathan Raban | Bad Land: An American Romance | Winner |
| 1996 | David Denby | Great Books | Finalist |
| 1996 | Daniel Goldhagen | Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Finalist |
| 1996 | Richard Kluger | Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris | Finalist |
| 1996 | Bernard Lewis | The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years | Finalist |
| 1997 | Anne Fadiman | The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures | Winner |
| 1997 | Jon Krakauer | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster | Finalist |
| 1997 | James Kugel | The Bible as It Was | Finalist |
| 1997 | Pauline Maier | American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence | Finalist |
| 1997 | Stephen Pinker | How the Mind Works | Finalist |
| 1998 | Philip Gourevitch | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families | Winner |
| 1998 | Adam Hochschild | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa | Finalist |
| 1998 | Ira Berlin | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America | Finalist |
| 1998 | Roy Porter | The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity | Finalist |
| 1998 | Simon Winchester | The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary | Finalist |
| 1999 | Jonathan Weiner | Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior | Winner |
| 1999 | Jane Brox | Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History | Finalist |
| 1999 | John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | Finalist |
| 1999 | Patricia Hampl | I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory | Finalist |
| 1999 | Jean-Paul Kauffmann | The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena | Finalist |
| 2000 | Ted Conover | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | Winner |
| 2000 | Fred Anderson | Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 | Finalist |
| 2000 | Frances FitzGerald | Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War | Finalist |
| 2000 | Laurie Garrett | Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health | Finalist |
| 2000 | Alice Kaplan | The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach | Finalist |
| 2001 | Nicholson Baker | Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper | Winner |
| 2001 | Nina Bernstein | The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care | Finalist |
| 2001 | Jan T. Gross | Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland | Finalist |
| 2001 | Laura Hillenbrand | Seabiscuit: An American Legend | Finalist |
| 2001 | Sam Roberts | The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair | Finalist |
| 2002 | Samantha Power | A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide | Winner |
| 2002 | Chris Hedges | War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning | Finalist |
| 2002 | William Langewiesche | American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center | Finalist |
| 2002 | Richard Rodriguez | Brown: The Last Discovery of America | Finalist |
| 2002 | Gaby Wood | Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life | Finalist |
| 2003 | Paul Hendrickson | Sons of Mississippi | Winner |
| 2003 | Caroline Alexander | The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty | Finalist |
| 2003 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag | Finalist |
| 2003 | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age | Finalist |
| 2003 | William T. Vollmann | Rising Up and Rising Down | Finalist |
| 2004 | Diarmaid MacCulloch | The Reformation: A History | Winner |
| 2004 | Kevin Boyle | Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age | Finalist |
| 2004 | Edward Conlon | Blue Blood | Finalist |
| 2004 | David Shipler | The Working Poor: Invisible in America | Finalist |
| 2004 | Timothy Tyson | Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story | Finalist |
| 2005 | Svetlana Alexievich | Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster | Winner |
| 2005 | Robert Fisk | The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East | Finalist |
| 2005 | Ellen Meloy | Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild | Finalist |
| 2005 | Caroline Moorehead | Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees | Finalist |
| 2005 | Anthony Shadid | Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War | Finalist |
| 2006 | Simon Schama | Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution | Winner |
| 2006 | Patrick Cockburn | The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq | Finalist |
| 2006 | Anne Fessler | The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade | Finalist |
| 2006 | Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Finalist |
| 2006 | Sandy Tolan | The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East | Finalist |
| 2007 | Harriet A. Washington | Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present | Winner |
| 2007 | Philip Gura | American Transcendentalism | Finalist |
| 2007 | Tim Weiner | Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA | Finalist |
| 2007 | Alan Weisman | The World Without Us | Finalist |
| 2007 | Daniel Walker Howe | What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 | Finalist |
| 2008 | Dexter Filkins | The Forever War | Winner |
| 2008 | George C. Herring | From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 | Finalist |
| 2008 | Jane Mayer | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals | Finalist |
| 2008 | Drew Gilpin Faust | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Finalist |
| 2008 | Allan Lichtman | White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement | Finalist |
| 2009 | Richard Holmes | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | Winner |
| 2009 | Greg Grandin | Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City | Finalist |
| 2009 | William T. Vollmann | Imperial | Finalist |
| 2009 | Tracy Kidder | Strength in What Remains | Finalist |
| 2009 | Wendy Doniger | The Hindus: An Alternative History | Finalist |
| 2010 | Isabel Wilkerson | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Winner |
| 2010 | Jennifer Homans | Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet | Finalist |
| 2010 | S.C. Gwynne | Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American | Finalist |
| 2010 | Barbara Demick | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea | Finalist |
| 2010 | Siddhartha Mukherjee | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Finalist |
| 2011 | Maya Jasanoff | Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Winner |
| 2011 | Amanda Foreman | A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War | Finalist |
| 2011 | John Jeremiah Sullivan | Pulphead: Essays | Finalist |
| 2011 | James Gleick | The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | Finalist |
| 2011 | Adam Hochschild | To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 | Finalist |
| 2012 | Andrew Solomon | Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity | Winner |
| 2012 | Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Finalist |
| 2012 | Steve Coll | Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power | Finalist |
| 2012 | David Quammen | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic | Finalist |
| 2012 | Jim Holt | Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story | Finalist |
| 2013 | Sheri Fink | Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital | Winner |
| 2013 | Lawrence Wright | Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief | Finalist |
| 2013 | David Finkel | Thank You for Your Service | Finalist |
| 2013 | George Packer | The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America | Finalist |
| 2013 | Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy | Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice | Finalist |
| 2014 | David Brion Davis | The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation | Winner |
| 2014 | Thomas Piketty with Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) | Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Finalist |
| 2014 | Hector Tobar | Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free | Finalist |
| 2014 | Elizabeth Kolbert | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History | Finalist |
| 2014 | Peter Finn and Petra Couvee | The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book | Finalist |
| 2015 | Sam Quinones | Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic | Winner |
| 2015 | Jill Leovy | Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America | Finalist |
| 2015 | Ari Berman | Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America | Finalist |
| 2015 | Mary Beard | SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome | Finalist |
| 2015 | Brian Seibert | What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing | Finalist |
| 2016 | Matthew Desmond | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Winner |
| 2016 | Jane Mayer | Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right | Finalist |
| 2016 | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War | Finalist |
| 2016 | Ibram X. Kendi | Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America | Finalist |
| 2016 | John Edgar Wideman | Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File | Finalist |
| 2017 | Frances FitzGerald | The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America | Winner |
| 2017 | Adam Rutherford | A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes | Finalist |
| 2017 | Kapka Kassabova | Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe | Finalist |
| 2017 | Jack Davis | Gulf: The Making of An American Sea | Finalist |
| 2017 | Masha Gessen | The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia | Finalist |
| 2018 | Steve Coll | Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan | Winner |
| 2018 | Lawrence Wright | God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State | Finalist |
| 2018 | Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt | The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure | Finalist |
| 2018 | Francisco Cantú | The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | Finalist |
| 2018 | Adam Winkler | We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights | Finalist |
| 2019 | Patrick Radden Keefe | Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Winner |
| 2019 | Kate Brown | Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future | Finalist |
| 2019 | Rachel Louise Snyder | No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us | Finalist |
| 2019 | Walt Odets | Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives | Finalist |
| 2019 | Peter Hessler | The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution | Finalist |
| 2020 | Tom Zoellner | Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire | Winner |
| 2020 | Isabel Wilkerson | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent | Finalist |
| 2020 | James Shapiro | Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future | Finalist |
| 2020 | Sarah Smarsh | She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs | Finalist |
| 2020 | Walter Johnson | The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States | Finalist |
| 2021 | Clint Smith | How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Winner |
| 2021 | Patrick Radden Keefe | Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Finalist |
| 2021 | Rebecca Solnit | Orwell’s Roses | Finalist |
| 2021 | Joshua Prager | The Family Roe: An American Story | Finalist |
| 2021 | Sam Quinones | The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth | Finalist |
| 2022 | Isaac Butler | The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act | Winner |
| 2022 | Kelly Lytle Hernández | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands | Finalist |
| 2022 | Joseph Osmundson | Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between | Finalist |
| 2022 | Annie Proulx | Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis | Finalist |
| 2022 | Ed Yong | An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us | Finalist |
| 2023 | Roxanna Asgarian | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Winner |
| 2023 | Kerry Howley | Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs | Finalist |
| 2023 | Dina Nayeri | Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough | Finalist |
| 2023 | Jeff Sharlet | The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War | Finalist |
| 2023 | Christina Sharpe | Ordinary Notes | Finalist |