The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award is an American literary award that honors written works that help people understand racism and appreciate the many different cultures in the world. Created in 1935 by Edith Anisfield Wolf, a poet and donor from Cleveland, and first managed by the Saturday Review, the awards have been overseen by the Cleveland Foundation since 1963.

The foundation gives awards in several categories, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, memoir/autobiography, and lifetime achievement. These awards are presented each September at a public ceremony attended by the winners. Past winners include Zora Neale Hurston (1943), Langston Hughes (1954), Martin Luther King Jr. (1959), Maxine Hong Kingston (1978), Wole Soyinka (1983), Nadine Gordimer (1988), Toni Morrison (1988), Ralph Ellison (1992), Edward Said (2000), and Derek Walcott (2004).

Since 1991, the jury has been made up of well-known American writers and experts. At that time, long-time jury chairman Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist, asked poet Rita Dove and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. to help judge the many books sent in each year. When Montagu retired in 1996, Gates took over as chair. In 1996, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, writer Joyce Carol Oates, and historian Simon Schama (all of whom retired before the 2024 awards) joined the jury. After Gould died in 2002, psychologist Steven Pinker replaced him. In 2024, Pinker and Dove retired. The current jury includes Natasha Trethewey (chair), Peter Ho Davies, Tiya Miles, Charles King, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea.