The recipients of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Awards were awarded their prizes last week at a ceremony at the New School.

The winners included Claudia Rankine, for Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press) in the poetry category; Nona Willis Aronowitz, for The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press) in criticism; Roz Chast, for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury) in autobiography; John Lahr, for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton) in biography; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf) in nonfiction; and Marilynne Robinson for Lila (FSG), in fiction.

Rankine was nominated for the criticism category for Citizen in addition to poetry—which was the first time in NBCC’s history that a title was nominated for more than one category.

Three other prizes were awarded, including the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, which went to Toni Morrison; the John Leonard Prize, which went to Phil Klay for Redeployment (Penguin Press); and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which went to Alexandra Schwartz, an assistant editor at the New Yorker, whose work has appeared in New Yorker, The Nation, the New York Times, and the New Republic.