New American Voices Award Ceremony

Enjoy the three powerhouse finalists – and celebrate the winner – of the Eighth Annual New American Voices Award for immigrant writers. Finalists Olufunke Grace Bankole, Cristina Jiménez, and Shubha Sunder, will be joined by this year’s judges: Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Brando Skyhorse, and Mary-Alice Daniel. The Awards ceremony will be preceeded by a light reception.

The New American Voices Award was created in 2018 by Fall for the Book and the Institute for Immigration Research to recognize recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.

This event is part of the Fall for the Book Festival, which runs from October 7-11, 2025. To view the full schedule, visit: https://fallforthebook.org/schedule/

Judges Citations about the Books

“Unfolding artfully through the character, culture, and conflicts of an aptly named protagonist, Amina—meaning “truth”—The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole is a stunning, statement-making debut novel. If the conventional “hero’s journey” involves going out, and the journey of heroines involves returning home, the narrative of the nomad—the immigrant narrative—encompasses both at once. The fragments of this lovely story’s “shells” reveal a transcontinental landscape: African, American, arabesque. Spiraling within stands a dreamscape wherein multigenerational bonds crystallize in elegant tendrils and in tender language that is in turns tender, lovely, and ambitious—ultimately successful—in its conveyance of the communal and individual: internal and externalized alienation, assimilation, adaptation, and arrival.”-Mary-Alice Daniel

“Dreaming of Home is an unforgettable journey, and a milestone in memoir: gripping, educational, and brimming with ideas at how to build lasting community. Its author, Cristina Jiménez, is a writer of thunderous skill and grace whose remarkable book reminds us, time and again, how important the values of compassion and generosity truly are. Cristina’s story is as inspirational as it is prescient for anyone whose voice is striving to be heard in a calamitous time. What’s in these pages demonstrate what values define a true American voice: empathy, imagination, fearlessness. Read this book and fill yourself with hope.” -Brando Skyhorse

“In Optional Practical Training, Shubha Sunder introduces us to Pavitra, a U.S. college graduate from Bangalore who decides to extend her stay in America via the OPT one-year visa. The year is 2006 and Sunder brilliantly limns the different ways Pavitra knowingly or unknowingly performs her identity as an immigrant after landing a job teaching math and physics at a private school in Massachusetts, often to make others (white people) feel comfortable, while at the mercy of a capricious and draconian post 9-11 immigration system that stands as an essential historical reminder of the precursor to the chaos and violence we have today.” -Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Host or Publisher Fall for the Book