Author Annette Gordon-Reed has won the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for 2009, an annual prize awarded by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for “the best book written in English on slavery or abolition.

She received the award for her history book, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year–where GalleyCat had that video interview with the author. The award was sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Here’s more from the release: “In addition to Gordon-Reed, the other finalists for the prize were Thavolia Glymph for ‘Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household’ (Cambridge University Press) and Jacqueline Jones for ‘Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War” (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers).’ The winner was selected by a review committee of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.”