From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, written by Princeton University scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and published by independent press Haymarket Books has won the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book.
Established in 2014, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for An Especially Notable Book honors nonfiction works of particular relevance to the current historical moment. The award recognizes writers whose work is of particular scholarly or journalistic quality, and also has purpose in providing ideological tools to inform and support struggles for cultural freedom and social, economic, and racial justice.
Dr. Cornel West writes that “Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her generation” and that her “brilliant” book “is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America.”
In 2026, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing “Books for Changing the World.” In those 25 years, we’ve helped build critical space and infrastructure for radical ideas and movements on the left to grow. That work of institution-building and popular political education has never been more necessary or more urgent. We need your help to continue to do this work.
