The poet, activist and educator Sonia Sanchez is this year’s winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement honor started in 1960 and previously given to Robert Frost, Toni Morrison and Stephen Sondheim among others.

This week’s new entertainment releases include albums from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and a Stephen Sondheim tribute from Betty Buckley, Ryan Reynolds starring as a time-traveling pilot in Netflix’s “The Adam Project” and a small-town murder case gets some big-star wattage in NBC’s “The Thing About Pam” with Renée Zellweger.

The National Book Foundation announced Friday that Karen Tei Yamashita has been awarded its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a $10,000 honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Robert Caro and Isabel Allende among others.

NEW YORK – Charles Yu's “Interior Chinatown,” a satirical, cinematic novel written in the form of a screenplay, has won the National Book Award for fiction. Tamara Payne and her father the late Les Payne's Malcolm X biography, “The Dead Are Arising,” was cited for nonfiction and Kacen Callender's “King and the Dragonflies” for young people's literature. The traditional dinner ceremony is the nonprofit National Book Foundation's most important source of income and is usually held at Cipriani Wall Street, where publishers and other officials pay thousands of dollars for tables or individual seats. The scholar Manning Marable died right before the 2011 publication of “Malcolm X,” which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and receive a National Book Award nomination. This is a story you should try to tell.”Winners in each of the competitive categories receive $10,000, and other finalists $1,000, with the money divided equally between the author and translator for best translated book.

NEW YORK – Stories of race, class and climate change were among the fiction finalists Tuesday for the 71st annual National Book Awards. The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced five works in each of five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation and young people's literature. None of the authors have been finalists before, although novelist Lydia Millet has been on the fiction longlist of 10. In 2011, Manning Marable died just before the release of “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Judging panels of authors, critics and others in the bookselling community selected finalists from nearly 1,700 books submitted by publishers.

NEW YORK Walter Mosley is receiving an honorary National Book Award, cited for dozens of books which range from science fiction and erotica to the acclaimed mystery series that has followed the life of Los Angeles private detective Ezekiel Easy Rawlins. The National Book Awards are presented by the non-profit National Book Foundation. But like such previous medal winners as Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, he has never been nominated for a National Book Award in a competitive category. Mosley knows well the reason: Crime fiction is usually bypassed when lists for a years best books are considered. In a statement Thursday, National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas noted the quantity, and quality, of Mosley's work.

In this image released by NBC, Jason Beghe portrays Hank Voight, left, in a scene from the crime series "Chicago PD." The divide between crime fiction and real life dates back to the genre's origins, more than 200 years ago. Law enforcement violence and corruption were extreme in the mid-19th century and some police forces were rooted in the patrols that used to chase down runaway slaves. Meanwhile, The police in early crime fiction were depicted as good, courageous, and brilliant, says Otto Penzler, the crime fiction publisher and bookseller. Over the past 50 years, the image of law enforcement has sometimes mirrored debates between liberals and conservatives.