Join the National Book Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and The Cooper Union for the 2025 Science + Literature Ceremony—celebrating the three remarkable 2025 Science + Literature selected titles in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry: The Last Animal, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, and Meltwater. The program is free and open to the public, and will feature readings and conversation with selected authors Ramona Ausubel, Claire Wahmanholm, and Ed Yong. 

The event will be presented in person at Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union and livestreamed for readers everywhere. Doors will open at 6:00pm, and the program will begin at 6:30pm EST. 

Register 

Registration on EventBrite is required. However, an EventBrite ticket does not guarantee entry as this is a first-come-first-served free event.  

About the Authors:

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of five books, most recently The Last Animal. She is the recipient of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, Tin House, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family. 

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, Redmouth, and, most recently, Meltwater, which was a finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award. A 2020 McKnight Writer Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer based in Oakland, CA. He is the author of two bestselling books: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. He was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, a Guggenheim Fellow, The Cooper Union's 2020 John Jay Iselin Memorial Lecturer, and is a member of Liminal—a science communication collective, co-founded by his wife Liz Neeley. He has a corgi named Typo.

2025 Science + Literature selection committee: Sara Goudarzi, Elizabeth Kolbert, Beronda L. Montgomery, Craig Santos Perez (Chair), and Joshua Sariñana 

Science + Literature identifies three books annually, across genres, that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology, and focuses on highlighting the diversity of voices in contemporary science and technology writing. Science + Literature is made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Read more about the Science + Literature program on the National Book Foundation's website.