A Pulitzer Finalist and a Novel About Return: Arab American National Museum Names 2026 Book Award Winners

The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn has named the winners of its 2026 Arab American Book Award, honoring five writers whose work spans memoir, poetry, fiction and political history — and whose recognition arrives as the museum says Arab American voices face renewed efforts to silence them. The headline winner is Hala Alyan, the Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist, who took the Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award for her debut memoir "I'll Tell You When I'm Home." The book, published last year by Avid Reader Press, braids Alyan's years of infertility and eventual motherhood via surrogate with a century of her family's displacement across Palestine, Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon. It has already collected serious national attention: it was a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist in memoir, was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made NPR's and Time's year-end best-book lists. The New York Times Book Review praised it for showing "the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland." The fiction award went to Sahar Mustafah, a Chicago-based Palestinian American writer, for her novel "The Slightest Green." The book follows Intisar, a Chicago nurse who travels to her father's ancestral village of Bayt al-Hawa after decades of estrangement, only to find herself drawn into her grandmother's fight to keep the family's land from being seized. Critics at World Literature Today and Middle East Monitor noted the novel's unflinching treatment of displacement across generations, tracing a throughline from the 1948 Nakba to present-day settler encroachment, even as some found its prose occasionally overwrought. The museum's award slate also recognized Hind Shoufani's poetry collection "Dark Star Requiem" with the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award, Karam Dana's "To Stand with Palestine: Transnational Resistance and Political Evolution in the United States" for non-fiction, and Safa Suleiman's "Hilwa's Gifts" in the children's category. Honorable mentions went to the Palestinian poetry anthology "Heaven Looks Like Us," edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi, along with nonfiction works by Sarah Aziza ("The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders") and Mohammed El-Kurd ("Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal"). The honorees will gather in Dearborn on October 24 for a reception and awards ceremony at the museum, featuring readings from the winning works and a book signing — an event the museum describes as a chance for the community to "showcase our own voices and tell our stories" at a moment when it says that storytelling is under pressure. The ceremony is supported by several of the museum's endowed award funds, including those honoring longtime literary figures Anan Ameri, Barbara and Adnan Aswad, George Ellenbogen and Evelyn Shakir. The Arab American Book Award, now in its third decade, has become one of the most closely watched literary prizes focused on Arab American writing, with past winners including authors who went on to major commercial and critical success. This year's slate reflects a body of work overwhelmingly centered on Palestinian experience — memoir, fiction and scholarship grappling with exile, land and the question of home — underscoring how deeply that history continues to shape Arab American literary output nearly a year into the fragile Gaza ceasefire. For a community that has often had its stories told by others, the award functions as both a literary honor and a form of cultural preservation: a public, institutional record of which books the Arab American community itself has decided matter most this year.