Alex Kotlowitz’s `An American Summer’ wins Lukas Book Prize

Alex Kotlowitz’s “An American Summer,” an intimate chronicle of gun violence in Chicago, has won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Kerri K. Greenidge’s “Black Radical,” a biography of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, received an award for history.

Both the Lukas prize and Mark Lynton History Prize come with $10,000, and were announced Wednesday by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, which administer the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards.

Also on Wednesday, the Lukas project announced two winners of the work-in-progress, a $25,000 prize. The recipients are Bartow J. Elmore for “Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and the Future of Food” and Shahan Mufti for “American Caliph: The True Story of the Hanafi Siege, America’s First Homegrown Islamic Terror Attack.”

The Lukas prizes, established in 1998, are named for the late author and investigative journalist and are given to nonfiction books that exemplify literary excellence and social consciousness. Past winners include Robert Caro, Jill Lepore and Andrew Solomon.

A May 5 awards ceremony has been postponed because of concerns about the coronavirus.