The Train to Crystal City, by Jan Jarboe Russell, has been shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the only literary prize in the U.S. that recognizes the value of literature to help promote peace and reconciliation throughout the world. The winner will be honored with a $10,000 prize in November in Dayton and the runner-up will receive $2,500. The five other finalists in non-fiction include Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Find Me Unafraid by Kennedy Odede and Jessica Posner, Nagasaki by Susan Southward, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America by Wil Haywood, and The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew.
The Train to Crystal City is described by Prize nominators as the “dramatic, never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved WWII Texas internment camp reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.”