Zócalo Public Square is proud to mark the 15th year of our annual book prize, which honors the U.S.-published nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Since 2011, we have honored authors who explore these important themes, which remain at the core of our mission of connecting people to ideas and each other.

Each year seems to present new threats to human connection—from political polarization and pandemic-enforced isolation to the siloes of our digital lives. And each year, a new crop of authors surprises and intrigues us with their incisive, provocative, forward-looking takes on the topic. We are excited to see how writers are rising to speak to this year’s challenges—and what they think will come next.

The 2025 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of producer Sasheen Artis, screenwriter Alessandro Camon, USC historian and Zócalo Advisory Board member Natalia Molina, 2024 Zócalo Book Prize winner and Our Migrant Souls author Héctor Tobar, Mississippi Today CEO Mary Margaret White, and National Civil Rights Museum president Russell Wigginton. Zócalo is grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for once again sponsoring our literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and participate in a public program in Los Angeles in spring 2025. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our shortlist. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit is October 25, 2024, at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any book nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

ASU California Center
Attn: Zócalo Public Square, Book Prize
919 S. Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90015

The 14 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. Some of their books meld personal memoir and historical research; others mine social science or economic and political theory. They are:

• Héctor Tobar for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Michelle Wilde Andersonfor The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion(Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)