‘Between the World and Me’ Author Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award For Nonfiction

Journalist and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates won the 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction for "Between the World and Me," the bestseller depicting America's racism issue. The awards were announced Wednesday evening at the National Book Foundation's ceremony in New York City.

Coates's book "Between the World and Me" was written as a letter to his son about being black in the U.S. The book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 17 long weeks since its July release. Coates was awarded one of the MacArthur Foundation's prestigious $625,000 "genius grant" in September.

"At the heart of our country is the notion that we are OK with the presumption that black people somehow have an angle, somehow have a predisposition to criminality," said Coates, accepting his award, reported The Guardian.

He dedicated the honor to his friend Prince Jones, who was shot to death 15 years ago by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal and whose tragedy is at the core of "Between the World and Me."

"I have been waiting 15 years for this moment. When Prince Jones died there were no cameras, there was nobody else watching. I'm a black man in America. I can't punish that officer... Between the World and Me comes out of that place. I can't secure the safety of my son. I can't go home and tell him it's going to be OK. You're not going to end up like Prince Jones. What I do have the power to do is say you won't enroll me in this lie," Coates said, according to Washington Post.

The fiction prize was given to Adam Johnson's "Fortune Smiles," a short story collection. The young people's literature prize went to Neal Shusterman's "Challenger Deep," a novel about a teenager dealing with schizophrenia. Robin Coste Lewis was awarded the National Book Award for poetry for "Voyage of the Sable Venus."