Four alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been longlisted for the National Book Award, a prestigious American literary award offered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission of celebrating the best literature published in the U.S. has previously awarded writers like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’Connor.

The National Book Award recognizes the best literature in five categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature — and selects a list of 10 titles that make up the longlist for each category that have been published between Dec. 1 of the previous year and Nov. 30 of the current year. 

This process makes up the literary category’s “longlist,” which is later narrowed down to five finalists before a winner is announced on Nov. 19. 

The 2025 longlist for fiction includes three Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni: Joy Williams, Kevin Moffett, and Angela Flournoy. The 2025 longlist for nonfiction includes Yiyun Li. 

In a statement to The Daily Iowan, Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, expressed her pride in the alumni of the workshop who have been honored with such a prestigious award. 

“On behalf of the workshop, I’m delighted that four of our graduates have been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Awards,” Chang said in the statement. “It’s great to see that the work of the four alumni, Joy Williams, Kevin Moffett, Yiyun Li, and Angela Flournoy, represent the workshop over several decades, with a special emphasis on the Class of 2005!”

Kevin Moffett is the author of “Only Son” and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. He has previously authored two collections of short stories and co-authored the book “The Silent Hill” with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby, which first debuted as a series of digital narratives for mobile devices. 

Moffett’s book isn’t available until November, which made the announcement that he was longlisted for the award a surprise. When he learned that he was longlisted, he said he felt “great, uncomplicatedly great.”

“Only Son” is a novel told in three parts and tells the story of three generations of men, beginning with the narrator as a child after his father has died and following him as he has his own son and goes on a roadtrip with his father’s journals. 

Moffett has primarily published short stories, and “Only Son” is his first novel. Many of his stories revolve around the death of a father, or father-like figure, which Moffett explained relates to losing his own father when he was young. “Only Son” delves into this theme directly.

“It’s obviously something that often, without even my wanting to, crops up in mysterious ways,” Moffett said. “Very often in my stories or other things I’ve written, it keeps coming back, but in this book there’s more of a head-on meeting of it, sort of staring it in the eye a little bit more in this longer form.”

Moffett said “Only Son” is an autobiographical novel and, alongside considering how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop impacted the craft of his novel, he explained he has a strong connection to Iowa City as well. It was where his son was born, and his son took his first steps on the first floor of Prairie Lights. 

“It’s really almost impossible for me to talk about any aspect of my writing life without thinking about how Iowa impacted it in some way,” Moffett said.

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Angela Flournoy is the author of “The Wilderness” and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2011. Her debut novel, “The Turner House,” was a finalist for the National Book Award’s fiction category in 2015.

Even though publishing has changed so much in the 10 years since “The Turner House” was published, Flournoy said she felt affirmed that the novel was received positively. 

“I feel really good,” she said. “You really have to have an open mind about how a book will be received, but it was really reaffirming to be on that list even before the book came out.”

“The Wilderness” is a novel following the stories of four friends — Desiree, Nakia, Monique, and January — as they navigate 20 years of friendship over the course of the two decades, as the world and political sphere change around them, and as they navigate the transition from young adulthood to middle age. 

The novel, which became available Sept. 16, is told from the perspective of each of the four women as they navigate their personal experiences alongside one another. As Flournoy worked on the novel, she said she also learned alongside her characters. 

She said she especially learned something while writing the character Monique, who begins the novel as a librarian and by the end of the novel is an influencer. Flournoy explained that her preconceived notions of what life as an influencer entailed were changed as she wrote the character. 

“Writing is one way that I think about the things I’m curious about,” Flournoy said. “In the writing of it, and because of the passage of time and the ways that I’ve just personally known and witnessed the different kinds of ways that people might have a platform on the internet, I became a lot more generous toward her and her journey.”

“The Wilderness” explores the importance of adult friendship and finding connections outside of the household. The novel was partially inspired by a friend of Flournoy’s mother’s whom her mom had been friends with for over 50 years. 

Flournoy said she considered her mother’s friend family and grew up calling her “auntie.” As she said, this relationship improved the quality of life for both women and was part of what inspired the friendship of her characters. 

“My hope is that people have a renewed understanding of the value of community, whether that is a friend group or however that community is built,” she said.

Community, Flournoy said, should extend beyond the idea of the nuclear family and should also include found family, like the characters of her novel, as well as the people around us. 

“Given the current challenges, and the challenges that I expect to arise in this country in the near future, people really have to break out of just their household and think of ways to make real connections to the people in their communities,” Flournoy said. “To protect each other and support each other, as the government  obviously refused to do that.”

Flournoy said the Iowa Writers’ Workshop contributed to her community, the people she considers friends, and with whom she would trust her work in its early stages. 

“Some of my closest friends during that time are still part of my life, and my early readers absolutely are people who I had in workshop and who I thought ‘Oh, this person gets me’ or ‘This person, they know how to give feedback in a way that I’m willing to receive,’” Flournoy said.