A native son of Guam Craig Santos Perez won the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry for his book “from unincorporated territory [åmot].”

Perez, a university professor, received the award in New York at the 74th National Book Awards among four other finalists.

The book is the fifth of Perez’s “unincorporated territory” series about Guam and its Indigenous people. The event is described as the “biggest night for books.”

“I am from a very small island of Guam and there is only one bookstore. And when I was a kid my mom would take me there every week to always buy me a book. She instilled the love of reading and writing from a very young age. So, thank you, mom. I love you so much,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Perez added, “...I come from Guam, which is a U.S. territory, one of the last remaining colonies in the world and when I was growing up in kind of a colonial American school system, I was never taught my own people’s literature. We were always taught American literature. So when I started writing, my mission was to hopefully inspire the next generation of Pacific islander authors.”

Perez shared the stage with Levar Burton and Oprah Winfrey who attended and spoke at the ceremony.