Karen Russell '06 and Gabrielle Calvocoressi '00 Named Finalists for National Book Award

Update: 

Fiction alum Karen Russell '06 and Poetry alum Gabrielle Calvocoressi '00 have made the shortlist for the 2025 National Book Award. Russell's novel The Antidote (Knopf, 2025) and Calvocoressi's book of poetry The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) earned them the distinction. Russell is one of five fiction writers and Calvocoressi one of five poets competing for the United States' highest award in letters.

Shortlisted authors, including Russell and Calvocoressi, will read excerpts from their nominated books at a celebration at NYU Skirball at 7 pm on November 18, 2025. $10 tickets are available here to attend the reading, with livestream options as well.

The ceremony announcing the winners of the 76th National Book Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation and Young People's Literature will take place at Cipriani Wall Street at 8 pm the evening of November 19. The event will be broadcast live at no cost. Registration for the livestream is available here.

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Original: Oct 6, 2025

Writing alums Karen Russell '06 and Gabrielle Calvocoressi '00 have made the 2025 National Book Award Longlists for fiction and poetry. 

Russell was recognized for her sixth book of fiction, The Antidote (Knopf, 2025). The novel, about a dust storm in Nebraska, grapples with the Great Depression as a backdrop for the story and follows a farmer and his orphan niece, a basketball player apprenticed to a "Prairie Witch,” and a New Deal photographer sent to record life in rural communities. The five characters come together after the dust storm ravages their town.

In an interview with NPR, Russell described how the novel’s photographer character was inspired by the books of Gordon Parks, a photojournalist whose work brought to light poverty, race, and civil rights issues in the United States from the 1940s through the 1970s. 

In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), Russell joked that she got the idea for writing the book “thousands of years ago in a prehistoric past when I was like a single person working on my first novel Swamplandia! I mean, putting the finishing touches on that novel, I got this image of a woman who was receiving secrets through an ear horn. My kids are the only children in 2025 who know what an ear horn is, those antique hearing aids that look kind of like gramophone horns.”

Kirkus Reviews writes that “what’s really on display here is Russell’s reckoning with America’s past and her hopeful appeals for its future.” 

Russell is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has been named by the National Book Foundation as one of the “5 under 35” and one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” among other honors and awards. 

Calvocoressi made the list with their latest book of poetry, The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), released in October. The book concerns itself with questions of gender and becoming, the portals of loss and desire. The book is described by the National Book Awards as "a devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives" and "a practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal."

The New Economy was born in an act of investigation, a desire to protect the body one is born with and imagine the world as inhabited in another body. "I’m someone who takes a long time to write a book," Calvocoressi told Poets House. "I talk about a little mushroom, or some plant under the surface. This manuscript took place over a long period of time, a period when I was pretty sick, physically ill, for a while, as well as a time in our country when—even still—we are in the guts of some kind of decomposition process. Let’s see what’s going to happen."

Calvocoressi's three other books of poetry are all acclaimed. They won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry with their collection Rocket Fantastic, were named a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist with Apocalyptic Swing, and won the Connecticut Book Award for The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.

The National Book Foundation will reveal the twenty-five finalist books for this prestigious award on October 7, 2025.