The Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award celebrates authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. The award, which is presented each year at Poets & Writers’ annual gala, is named for Barnes & Noble in appreciation of its long-standing support.

Recipients of the 2022 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award will be Viet Thanh Nguyen, James Patterson, and Sonia Sanchez.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. Nguyen is co-founder and supporter of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), which sponsors and promotes Vietnamese artists and writers. With no budget and voluntary labor, Nguyen created the blog diaCRITICS to share news about Vietnamese diasporic arts and to provide a publishing platform for Vietnamese writers.