'Oak Flat' Tells The Story Of An Apache Tribe Fighting To Save Its Land From Mining

Artist and writer Lauren Redniss creates books like no one else's.

She mixes art, design, and rigorous research with a prose style that is at once assertive, journalistic and poetic. The results, though strictly based in fact, seem at once like graphic novels minus the familiar panel format, longform essays enriched by full-page drawings, and plays driven by monologue. Her sui generis style has earned her a MacArthur "genius" grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a National Book Award nomination for 2010's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, which the award citation praised for "expand[ing] the realm of non-fiction.