For 72 years, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has been developing and supporting leaders in various fields through its Fellowship programs. This year, like most years, WW Fellows made discoveries, published important research and work, made advances in their careers, and helped shape their disciplines. Here is a look at the books that garnered major awards and recognition in 2017.

National Book Award winner
Frank Bidart WF ’62 won a National Book Award for Poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. He has been nominated for four previous National Book Awards, including his 2013 collection, Metaphysical Dog, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

National Book Award nominations
Two Fellows were finalists in non-fiction: Erica Armstrong Dunbar CEF ’03 for Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, and Nancy MacLean CN ’88 for Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Richard Rothstein WF H ’63, made the non-fiction longlist for The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

WW Fellows Finalists for National Book Critics Circle Awards
Mark Greif MN ’00 was a finalist in criticism for his essay collection, Against Everything, and Robert Pinsky WF ’62 was a finalist in poetry for his latest work, At the Foundling Hospital. The NBCC presented Margaret Atwood WF ’61 with a lifetime achievement award.

In April, the New-York Historical Society presented Jane Kamensky MN ’87 with its annual book prize in American history for A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley.

Sara Scalenghe CN ‘04 won the 2016 DHA Outstanding Book Award from The Disability History Association, for her book Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800.

Gary S. Schiff’s WF ’71 first book, Tradition and Politics: The Religious Parties of Israel (Wayne State University Press, 1977), has been selected under a $773,761 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a “great humanities book” deserving of being preserved forever by being digitized and reissued in print.

Laura Micheletti Puaca WS ‘05 won the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize for an outstanding book on the role of women in science for her Searching for Scientific Womenpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940-­‐1980.

If you’d like to tell us about your 2017 accomplishments, tweet at us, find us on Facebook, or send us an email to let us know!

---