2022 Judges’ Statements

BIOGRAPHY
Judge: David Cady

Winner: Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering by Paige Bowers & David Montague

Overnight Code is the inspiring and powerful story of Raye Montague, an African American woman born in 1935 in the segregated South, who overcame many obstacles to reach the pinnacle of her profession. As a single mother, Raye Montague, educated herself both inside and outside of the classroom to become the professional of her dreams against what seemed like insurmountable odds. Working for the United States Navy, Montague became, not just the first woman or the first African American, but the first person to draft a Naval ship by computer using a program she designed. This well documented and incredible book demonstrates that perseverance and passion are truly the keys to success in fulfilling your life-long ambitions.

Finalist: The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography by Jerry Grillo

Reading like a novel, Jerry Grillo did a superb job of conveying, in detail, the story of a wild and mysterious Atlanta legend, Bruce Hampton. The author painted a moving portrait of the often-misunderstood life and times of a man who inspired creativity in others through his humor and his playing of some of the best music ever heard in America. Most importantly, Grillo helps the reader see the world through Hampton’s eyes – and he created a truly mesmerizing vision.

CHILDREN’S BOOK
Judge: Malcolm Mitchell

Winner: We Are All Under One Wide Sky by Deborah Wiles, Illustrated by Andrea Stegmaier

We Are All Under One Wide Sky is delivered with superb timing. While life seems to be different from person to person, the whole truth is that we all have so much in common. Whether through triumphs or tragedies, we share the human experience of wanting to be our best selves. By celebrating our diversity we reveal our similarities. Instead of using our talents in isolated pockets, we move this world forward by using our talents in unison. We Are All Under One Wide Sky sends a message that will never lose its value: We are stronger together.

Finalist: I Can Help by Reem Faruqi, Illustrated by Mikela Prevost

With a breathtaking dose of vulnerability, Reem Faruqi and Mikela Prevost grant an opportunity for us to step into the perspective of a child whose innate instinct is to help, but struggles with the social barriers that inflict us all, even as adults. I Can Help highlights the beauty an pains associated with those who want to help, and those who want to be helped. While the central character learns a valuable lesson, as a reader taking on the perspective of the two characters that need a little extra attention, I learned there is value in helping for all parties involved.

COOKBOOK
Judge: Asha Gomez

Winner: Cheryl Day's Treasury of Southern Baking by Cheryl Day

As much as I am someone who loves to cook Southern food, I'm often intimidated by baking. Cheryl Day's cookbook has quickly become my go to Southern Baking Bible that I can depend on for delicious sweet treats. This trusted trove of recipes is born out of what Cheryl accurately calls "lineage", an ancestry that ties her generationally to recipes that are rooted in the South. How Lucky we are that we can now bring Cheryl Day's Treasury Of Southern Baking into our kitchens to satisfy our sweet tooth.

Finalist: Y'all Come Over: Charming Your Guests with New Recipes, Heirloom Treasures, and True Southern Hospitality by Rebecca Lang

Let Rebecca Lang show you how to throw a party in the South y'all! This book is a gem for people who love to entertain, it guides you on how to be genuinely hospitable and as Rebecca says "no matter the size of your home or budget, entertaining can be a sparkling light in your life."

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY
Judge: Brian Panowich

Winner: A Fire in the Night by Christopher Swann

It’s already been proven that Christopher Swann can offer up fantastic and engaging novels, but with A Fire In The Night, Swann gives us a no-holds-barred action mystery thriller that in nearly impossible to put down. The plot is a speeding bullet and the attention to detail and setting is amazing, but mainly Swann can just flat-out write people. He plays inside the gray area where heroes can sometimes not be so heroic and where villains garner as much sympathy as the protagonists. Swann's ability to convey a true family dynamic yet never stop churning out cinematic scenes custom made for the big screen makes Christopher Swann one of the best writers that Georgia—or anywhere for that matter—has to offer.

Finalist: While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams

It’s incredibly hard not to be a fan of Stacey Abrams. The woman. The activist. And definitely the writer. While Justice Sleeps is a compelling and complex legal thriller on par with any of the masters of the genre such as Meltzer and Grisham. The book checks all the boxes. Danger, intrigue, a shadow government, a brutal plot and fascinating characters, and not once does the novel pander to its readers or speak over our heads. It’s a brilliant book written by a brilliant author who every Georgian should have on the top shelf of their bookcase.

ESSAY

Judge: Megan Volpert

Winner: Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South by Regina N. Bradley

Bradley is a defining voice of the new south—an engrossing one that blends academic analytical chops with the personal narrative of lived experience as a Black woman who grew up after the civil rights movement. Her argument, that hip-hop culture since the Eighties represents concerns and methodologies of the next wave of contemporary southern Black identities, is clear and persuasive and without alternatives. Chronicling Stankonia begins with a close philosophical reading of Outkast and ends with an exhortation to invigorate cultural studies through attention to the popular arts and letters made by Black southerners. To echo André 3000, “Regina Bradley got something to say.”

Finalist: Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans by Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray’s lifelong ecology project continues in Wild Spectacle with a deeply poetic and broadly relatable bent. The beauty of Georgia and Montana are particularly on display in a collection of essays covering travels all over the globe that are linked by themes of meridian, migration and magnitude rather than chronology or place. Ray is an expert at both showing and telling, sometimes allowing a powerful spectacle to speak for itself and other times explaining what is truly at stake for unprotected wilds in the long-term. Wild Spectacle proves yet again that Ray is a trusted guide.

FIRST NOVEL
Judge: Ginger Eager

Winner: The Parted Earth by Anjali Enjeti

Anjali Enjeti’s family saga, The Parted Earth, drew me in from the first page. tlove story of Deepa and Amir, two teenagers living in New Delhi in 1947. Their youthful affections take on multigenerational consequence when the sectarian and religious violence of Partition overturns their lives. What follows is a mystery whose very structure mirrors the effects of genocide and exile. There are more beginnings than endings, more questions than answers. The work of piecing together the past falls to the grandchildren—specifically, Deepa’s Indian-American granddaughter, Shan, who is committed to understand her father and grandmother despite the complicated role each has played in her life. Enjeti doesn’t shy away from the damages wrought by trauma, and neither is she afraid to proclaim the profound, life-altering capacities of generosity, forgiveness, and stubborn familial love. The Parted Earth is cathartic and renewing. I cried the best sort of tears at the end.

Finalist: All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris

Wanda M. Morris’s legal thriller, All Her Little Secrets, doesn’t sacrifice a whit of theme to plot. I couldn’t quit turning pages to discover the sinister scheme that protagonist Ellice Littlejohn works to uncover at Houghton Transportation Company, but never did my speed reading allow me to breeze past Littlejohn’s experience as an educated Black woman in corporate America. Even as she’s fighting a big fight against the well-funded, well-organized racism of a hate group that intends to frame her for its wrong-doing, her days are punctuated by steady, smaller racisms, such as microaggressions from clueless coworkers and racist profiling from store clerks. Even the secret from her childhood that may be her downfall if uncovered reveals less about Littlejohn’s capacity to do wrong than about her determination to survive when targeted. By the time Littlejohn struts into Houghton ready to be “done with this hellhole and the ignorant bigots that inhabited it,” I was rooting for her in a way that curled the edges of the book. 

HISTORY
Judge: Lisa Russell 

Winner: Peachtree Corners, Georgia: The History of an Innovative and Remarkable City, 1777-2020 by Carole Townsend

At first glance, Peachtree Corners, Georgia: The History of an Innovative and Remarkable City 1777-2020, looks like a beautiful coffee-table book. Open the cover and discover Carole Townsend’s skilled history narratives. In the end, comes down to good writing with impeccable research. The opening pages set the tone:

What we are at risk of sacrificing with change is our heritage, the history of a place, the land, and her people. Once those treasures are bulldozed and buried under the red Georgia clay, they are lost forever; all that remains are the memories, scattered photographs, and word-of-mouth accounts of those who walked here before us. Eventually, even those are lost to transition, to carelessness, to fire, to flood, and ultimately to death. (Townsend xiii)

History books can be dull and data-filled or story-driven and compromise the truth. Townsend strikes the perfect balance.

Finalist: Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast by William Rawlings

William Rawlings continues to be the premier Georgia narrative historian. After several titles exploring Georgia’s history, Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast does not disappoint.

This beautifully designed book draws the reader into the historical significance of Georgia’s coastal lighthouses. His narratives of shipwrecks explain why lighthouses popped up across our coastlines. The solid stories draw us into the engineering details and captivate readers to go deeper.

He does not ignore the mystical quality and symbolism of lighthouses while offering encouragement in these difficult days:

Over the centuries the lighthouse has become more than a physical object. For many, it is seen as a powerful symbol of hope, a metaphysical beacon of guidance for those tossed about on the stormy seas of life, a psychological landmark pointing the way to a place of shelter. (Rawlings 10)

Honorable Mention: Seen/Unseen: Hidden Lives in a Community of Enslaved Georgians by Christopher R. Lawton, Laura E. Nelson, and Randy L. Reid

If there were a third-place category, this book would be it. This group of authors and editors did impeccable research by using primary sources. The letters confirm the narrative. The history is not pretty or admirable, but the authors tell the story of slave owners who established an early franchise in Georgia. Even difficult history deserves to be told. The letters include former enslaved as well as the Cobb-Lamar family.

INSPIRATIONAL
Judge: Beth-Sarah Wright

Winner: Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation by John Lewis

With wisdom, wit and authenticity, Lewis shares his unique insight on a variety of topics ranging from Justice and Hope to Marriage and Love to the Pandemic and On Leaving a Legacy among many more. He continues to teach, guide and offer keen perspective from a lifetime of experiences as a civil rights activist, dedicated congressman and accomplished human being.

Finalist: Eavesdropping on the Most Segregated Hour: A City’s Clergy Reflect on Racial Reconciliation edited by Andrew M. Manis and Sandy Dwayne Martin

Editors Andrew M. Manis and Sandy Dwayne Martin have created a timely book that raises an important conversation about race and its place in pulpits across America.  With a diversity of contributors, this book takes the reader on a journey that critically explores the challenges and opportunities for 'the most segregated hour' through stories and perspectives on some of the country's most pressing questions around politics, racial reconciliation and Christianity. 

LITERARY FICTION
Judge: Zoe Fishman

Winner: Midnight Atlanta by Thomas Mullen

There’s something about a good crime novel. The reader is transported to the scene; taking diligent notes on a pad of paper with a nubby pencil while wearing a fedora. And that’s just a good one. The great ones, like Mullen’s Midnight Atlanta seamlessly weave history and setting while amplifying the humanity of its characters and most importantly its protagonist. 

This is a crime novel not just about a murder, but about racism: both implied and absolute. You can feel Atlanta in its pages –a bourbon just before the storm rolls in; a belly full of barbecue; a whole lot of history in the humid summer air.

Finalist: Song of the Horseman by Mark Warren

To seamlessly weave descriptive prose and interior thought while propelling a story forward is no small task, but do so while simultaneously evoking empathy for and frustration towards the protagonist is impressive. But to pull that off while meshing two generations’ worth of grief, misunderstanding and racism against a masterfully rendered backdrop of nature in all of its infinite glory while touching on the universal bond between man and animal is downright Herculean. Warren’s prose is magnificently rendered; the kind of writing that makes the reader put down their book for a moment and marvel. 

This is a story about retracing steps, both literal and figurative to find out where we began.

MEMOIR
Judge: Kristie Robin Johnson

Winner: Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart

An epistle, in its simplest form, is a letter—a formal or didactic written communication. At its height, an epistle is a gospel—a glorious tiding, a doctrine, an uncompromised truth. Danté Stewart’s Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle is soul-changing gospel. Stewart’s often ecclesiastical cadence becomes palpable as he explores the seminal notion: “I wonder if the country I love can imagine itself as being better than the ways it has learned to be terrible.” Through his sometimes harrowing and often maddening experiences that range from being shot at by a racist neighbor to being silenced by well-meaning Christians, Stewart takes both a sleeping society and a spineless church to task. By way of his own moving revelation, the reader is challenged to examine their own humanity. Shoutin’ in the Fire is a work of both unrelenting bravery and forward-looking hope. It is the gospel truth indeed.

Finalist: The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames by Justine Cowan

“It is lonely to have no love for one’s mother.” This stark confession from the final page of Justine Cowan’s gripping memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, is a perfect distillation of the profound emotional honesty that is the hallmark of all notable works of art. Cowan’s journey into her mother’s mysterious unspoken past reveals not only a traumatic personal history, but also a dark social history fraught with the brutality of codified misogyny, classism, and child abuse. As Cowan examines the origins of the Foundling Hospital, a sinister almost-Dickensian institution in which her mother spent her formative years, she discovers telling truths about her mother and herself. As she writes “But my mother’s journey was not about anger—it was about shame” readers sense a shift in Cowan’s heart, that universal sense of relief that comes with understanding one’s parent. Ultimately, this narrative is a meditation on the healing power of reflection and forgiveness—forgiving one’s mother and forgiving oneself.

POETRY CHAPBOOK
Judge: Jae Nichelle

Winner: Still, No Grace by A. Prevett

Still, No Grace is a thoughtful and creative exploration of gender, the body, and what it means to be and to become. Each poem is full of the type of intimate tenderness one would expect out of a reunion with a close friend, and so many lines take gorgeous, unpredictable turns that keep readers invested and on their toes (i.e. “Your name should be the name you would give to an alien/ if you were the first person it met.”) This honest collection asks hard questions and illustrates the inherent clumsiness in the task of searching for and finding ourselves.

Finalist: Demoted Planet by Katherine Fallon

Incredibly moving and balanced, Demoted Planet is one of those chapbooks that pulls the reader to return to it again and again. Each poem is like a vignette, slowly unveiling the narrative of a child coping with loss. Fallon’s elegant delivery of poignant images and the small moments that make up a life take the reader on a journey through the complexities of grief. This collection is simultaneously heart-wrenching and captivating.

POETRY FULL-LENGTH
Judge: Julie E. Bloemeke

Winner: Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie

Aurielle Marie’s Gumbo Ya Ya is searing sanctuary and feast; it shapes the stars of Blk gxrl voice and queer body politic.  Summoning in egun, Aurielle Marie’s poems companion us sharp, splinter a relentless encourage to take up the “joint contract” of curiosity; they necessary our eviction from colonist and capitalist conditioning.  Dazzlingly dangerous, vulnerably acrobatic in form, riff, and sound break, these poems catapult from the page and into the marrow, irrevocable.  Language is held accountable, even as it consumes and anneals.  The altar of Gumbo Ya Ya is a temple of wonder and divine interruption—a cartography that calls us with absolute certainty, a gospel we undeniably must return to again and again. 

Finalist: Saint Agnostica by Anya Krugovoy Silver

In a letter to her son, Anya Krugovoy Silver wrote:  I still exist. Energy doesn’t die.  This testament is proven repeatedly in Saint Agnostica, a posthumous collection of poems that winds into spaces of mystic attunement, one that bares and bears the questions within the universe of the body.  A reconciliation with divine presence and absence, these poems invite us into unavoidable depths of grief, into raw truths of confronting grace in one’s final chapters.  Attentive in their rendering, offering “miracles of quiet/and quickness, of coupled wildness,” Krugovoy Silver’s work never shies from fang or insistence.  A collection lovingly finalized by her husband and family of poets, an anthem from a beloved teacher and sage departed too soon, the resonance of Saint Agnostica is a comfort: Krugovoy Silver’s words will keep their time within us, fierce in their compassion.  This book is a gratitude to open and reopen.

ROMANCE
Judge: Susan Sands 

Winner: The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley

Colleen’s writing is immersive, humorous, and entertaining. The Invisible Husband of Frick Island is the story of one man’s dogged journey to discover the truth, but what he finds is far more enlightening. Written with gentleness and wisdom, the romance unfolds between Piper and Anders as they discover that persistence and an open mind make anything possible. The twist at the end is the cherry on top of this lovely story.

Finalist: The Break-Up Book Club by Wendy Wax

Wendy writes with sparkling wit and empathy for those who find themselves in tough situations. In this story of heartbreak, friendship, and redemption, Wendy masterfully juggles four points of view as the story celebrates overcoming obstacles in life and coming together to support one another and rejoice in that victory. This story is a testament to strength and perseverance in a challenging world.

YOUNG ADULT
Judge: Kristin Gwin

Winner: The Bronzed Beasts by Roshani Chokshi

Roshani Chokshi delivers a bittersweet conclusion to the Gilded Wolves series. Over three books, Chokshi crafts vivid, diverse characters that grow together as they solve puzzles, mysteries and relationship hurdles in a magical 19th century world based in folklore and history. The Bronzed Beasts is a satisfying end to a powerful series. Chokshi’s lyrical storytelling and realistic, loveable characters are hard to leave behind. Roshani Chokshi is a powerhouse in middle grade and young adult literature. It will be exciting to see what she comes up with next!

Finalist:  Fast Pitch by Nic Stone
Nic Stone hits a home run with her release of Fast Pitch! Stone’s passion for softball amplifies the authenticity of this middle-grade sports mystery expertly interwoven with history. When a dark family secret threatens middle softball captain, Shenice Lockwood’s, regional championship, she must grapple with the history of racism in baseball in order to lead her team to a historic victory.

2021 Judges’ Statements

CHILDREN’S BOOK
Judge: Tanya Valentine 

Finalist: Rita & Ralph’s Rotten Day by Carmen Agra Deedy, illustrated by Pete Oswald
Rita & Ralph’s Rotten Day is a lovely portrayal of the ups and downs of even the best of friendships. When a new game ends with tears and anger, these two friends must navigate their way back to each other with authentic apologies and understanding. This sweet story is enhanced by Pete Oswald’s beautiful illustrations.

Winner: My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World by Malcolm Mitchell, illustrated by Michael Robertson
My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World  is perfect for struggling readers! Henley wants desperately to enjoy reading. But long sentences, difficult words, and boring subjects are just some of the hurdles he encounters. When he learns he must share his favorite book in the whole wide world with the class, Henley seeks help at the library and book shop with no luck. But encouraging words from his mama help Henley discover his perfect book. Malcolm Mitchell’s inspiring story reminds us that struggling readers are not always “reluctant” readers.  And Michael Robertson’s adorable art brings the story of Henley to life.

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY
Judge: Emily Carpenter

Finalist: Never Turn Back by Christopher Swann
With gorgeous, spare writing, Swann lets this story unfold, one dark step at a time. As the secrets unspool, we’re drawn into a twisty, hardboiled, noir-style story of the dark side of family. But the author never lets his hero get too tough or bullet-proof. There’s a beating heart of vulnerability under everything that happens as Ethan Faulkner digs up the bloody past.

Winner: Stranger in the Lake by Kimberly Belle
Stranger in the Lake is a thriller that accomplishes many things at one. It offers the reader both an exciting, unpredictable, and twisty plot, while simultaneously exploring the nuances of human behavior. It’s a satisfying suspense story, yes, but also a deep-dive into class in our society. Allowing ourselves to turn a blind eye to the faults of the people we love when that love means our survival, can be anyone’s downfall.

FIRST NOVEL
Judge: Spencer Wise

Finalist: Purple Lotus by Veena Rao
Purple Lotus is a deeply troubling portrait of a brave, young Indian woman immigrating to America only to find herself trapped in an abusive marriage. One thing I appreciate so much about this book is the kindness and friendship that emerges organically between women, often strangers at first, often from wildly disparate backgrounds, who nonetheless come together to form a community and provide that sense of home they’re otherwise denied. I thought that kind of resistance was very powerful and compelling to read.

Winner: The Nature of Remains by Ginger Eager
I was blown away with the layered narrative and range of voices in this southern gothic novel. In The Nature of Remains, each character is rendered with compassion and dignity despite their hardscrabble background and circumstances. It’s oozing with authenticity about small town Georgia and yet it’s still, like all great fiction, about universal themes—flawed humans longing to find our rightful place in the world while also providing for our families and loved ones.

HISTORY
Judge: Akila McConnell

Finalist: Pure Evil: The Machetti Murders of Macon, Georgia by Jaclyn Weldon White
Jaclyn Weldon White confronts the definition of “pure evil” in this fast-paced and bizarre true story of the Machetti murders. To an outside observer, Becky Machetti was a middle-class white woman in small town Macon, Georgia, with a hard-working husband and three daughters. But, inside Becky’s head, she was a mafia boss. Machetti’s murderous fantasies led to the deaths of two people, the abuse of her daughters, life imprisonment and execution for two men, and her own life in prison. Vividly portrayed, White pulls the reader into Machetti’s deranged mind through the use of extensive interviews, letters, and newspaper reports.

Winner: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt
In Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt deftly combats the presumption that Native American removal was an inevitable consequence of colonization. Rather, Saunt proves that Indigenous deportation in the 1830s was a systematic and avaricious enterprise, suffused with white supremacy and callousness. Throughout, Saunt connects slavery with Indigenous removal: the South’s desire to expand into Indian territory was directly related to its desire to expand its slaveholding territories. Likewise, the country’s resulting wealth was the direct consequence of the native peoples’ resulting poverty. An even-handed and meticulous study of unbridled power and greed, Saunt leaves the reader assessing the “price of expulsion,” asking hard questions that a worthy republic must answer. 

INSPIRATIONAL
Judge: Tara Coyt

Finalist: Love or Work: Is It Possible to Change the World, Stay in Love, and Raise a Healthy Family? By André and Jeff Shinabarger
Love or Work is a tool for achieving peace and fulfillment and love within self, family, and community. It will be particularly helpful for middle class couples who strive to be successful in their careers while being great spouses and parents. The conversational tone, chapter structure and dialogue presented by André & Jeff Shinabarger offer experiences and observations from this husband and wife team.

 Winner: Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice
In Native the journey to reconcile and honor the author’s Potawatomi Nation and white Christian heritage lead to broader notions of faith and belonging. Kaitlin Curtice introduces Native American cultures and traditions, while also reminding us of Christianity’s painful role in colonization, racism, religious discrimination, and the near extinction of Native Americans. This timely book calls readers to acknowledge and appreciate the universal sacredness and value of all human beings and their faiths.

LITERARY FICTION
Judge: Snowden Wright

Finalist: The Promised Land by Elizabeth Musser
Elizabeth Musser’s The Promised Land revolves around three characters who, facing a metaphorical crossroads in their lives, venture toward a literal one along the Camino pilgrimage route in France: Abbie, dealing with the break-up of her marriage; her son Bobby, discovering his artistic ambition while on a gap year; and Caroline, coping with the disappearance of her best friend. In straightforward but agile narration, the novel explores how pathways, between strangers, between generations, can sometimes converge in unlikely places. The result is a quiet marvel of grace. Musser draws subtle connections between the characters’ lives in Atlanta and what they find in France—the Beltline as its own sort of French Camino—and uses those connections to weave a beautiful, heartfelt portrait of what it means to be a Georgian, a Southerner, an American, and, most importantly, a person in the world.

Winner: Pride of Eden by Taylor Brown
Published at the start of a pandemic that halted physical contact and three days before Tiger King premiered on Netflix, spotlighting issues of wildlife conservation, Taylor Brown’s prescient novel Pride of Eden follows a group of misfits who find community among each other as they rescue exotic animals from exploitative venues and owners. The gorgeously written prose, with muscular verbs, tendinous adjectives, and skeletal nouns, renders flesh to many of today’s most important concerns, including poverty and climate change. Brown forgets neither the context of his book’s historical moment nor the fact we’re still living in it. That context may be worn on the book’s sleeve, but it’s tucked into the fabric, hidden and utilitarian, like a 1950s-greaser’s pack of cigarettes. At one point in this emotionally wrenching, visually crystalline novel, an escaped lion prowls through a housing development left abandoned after the recession. Such a powerful image, as with Pride of Eden overall, weds the housing crisis to animal activism. The connection? Home. Animals and people alike need a home, their own personal Eden, a place in which to take pride.

MEMOIR
Judge: Christopher Martin

Honorable Mention: Roll the Stone Away: A Family’s Legacy of Racism and Abuse by Ann Hite
Roll the Stone Away is a courageous and vital work, layered with history and genealogy. We need storytellers like Ann Hite who are willing to confront engrained trauma so that it will no longer perpetuate. Always, we need the perspectives of strong women, getting us closer to the truth and breaking the cycle of violence. We need these Southern chronicles that suggest a more excellent way, reminding us this is the work of everyone, however small our voices may seem. 

Finalist: High Cotton by Kristie Robin Johnson
Kristie Robin Johnson’s High Cotton is a work of reflection and remembrance, itself—to borrow a phrase from one of the book’s many moving scenes—a “sun-kissed expression” of joy set against a backdrop of loss, addiction, and violence. Further, this joy stands against the structural racism that has corroded so much, though it could not overcome the light of Johnson’s matriarchs who “survived colored-only restrooms, segregated schools, the growing pains of justice delayed,” or the light of Johnson’s oldest known ancestor who, while enslaved in Lincolnton, Georgia, swam across a lake to try to get back—no, to try to save, to rescue—her child who had been stolen from her and sold to a nearby plantation. Johnson carries such maternal light forward. This is a work of perseverance, an affirmation of the words of Johnson’s grandmother Tine—“Keep living, baby”—and a record of the ways Johnson has done just that, whether by reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with her young son, relishing the music of Mary J. Blige and Tupac, contemplating the black water of the Augusta Canal and the violet sky above it, or proclaiming the love of the hood, likening it to the enduring, selfless agape love of which St. Paul speaks, made manifest in the acts of the Cookie Man, the Dress Lady, the Water Man, and so many others, each their own kind of apostle. This is a work that does not end, but drifts with the spirits of those who love so fiercely as to remember dreams. 

 Winner: Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
I’d be remiss not to say that, without awareness for the date, except it was near the end of the month and thus near my deadline, I began drafting this reflection on April 26­—the day that in 1966 saw Natasha Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, drive alone, through a “barrage of rebel flags lining the streets” for Mississippi’s 100th-anniversary celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, “on her way to the segregated ward” of Gulfport Memorial Hospital to bring her daughter, the poet, memoirist, and courage-teacher we know and honor today, into the world. Perhaps it is unconventional to wish someone a now-belated happy birthday in presenting a literary award. Still, though it will be summer before these words go public, I thought it fitting to acknowledge that April day as a way of saying we are glad Natasha Trethewey’s courageous mother made that memorial drive those years ago, and that, though we can only imagine the emotional toll, we are grateful Natasha Trethewey made this memorial drive of her own, returning to Georgia through this story.

Memorial Drive is the kind of book of which, out of respect for it and the sacred terrain it covers, I’m inclined to say nothing. Silence, reverence, and reflection are the fruits of encountering any monument worth the name, any monument that honors truth, renews the imagination, and nurtures genuine discourse and empathy. Here Natasha Trethewey has crafted such a monument to her mother, once more—with her mother’s spirit ever at her side—standing against the forces of erasure, the powers entrenched in an untenable history, the structures that have sustained white supremacy, misogyny, and the ways of violence for far too long. I’m not alone in saying Natasha Trethewey has for some time now been a guiding light for me. Memorial Drive, a work of sorrow and endless love, is one more verse, perhaps the foundational verse, in her body of work, an abiding poetry both elegiac and epic.

POETRY FULL-LENGTH
Judge: Malcolm Tariq

Finalist: Slide to Unlock by Julie E. Bloemeke
Julie E. Bloemeke’s Slide to Unlock is a singing chorus of desire. These poems render a tender overview of what is at play between the mind and the body. The past and the present. The said and the unsaid. For poems that are so insular and introspective about wanting and longing, they are loud with the vastness of all that love of self, others, and life can do. This book is a journey worth returning to.

Winner: Fractures by Carlos Andrés Gómez
In Fractures, Carlos Andrés Gómez delivers a poignant, thoughtful interrogation of what it means to live and love when society gives so many reasons not to. These poems chart that difficulty and invite deep reflection about fatherhood and interpersonal relationships, and the strains that racism and notions of manhood place on them. Long after they have been read, the poems continue to hold the reader. They teach us that there is forgiveness. There are different ways of caring. And there are different ways of moving forward with the many things we carry.

ROMANCE
Judge: Ricki Cardenas

Finalist: (Im)perfectly Happy by Sharina Harris
Harris immerses you in friendship and fun as four kick-ass women reunite to help one another follow the respective ambitions they’ve cast aside since college. The Brown Sugarettes will have you calling your sister, tossing out your dusty ol’ copy of Sex and the City, and planning a girls’ trip with your besties. It’s a love letter to anyone who’s put their dreams on the backburner in adulthood—and it’s also a strong reminder that, sometimes, the love of your life just might be your friends.

Winner: You Were There Too by Colleen Oakley
With sweeping brushstrokes of emotion and humor stippled throughout, Oakley paints an ornate tapestry for her readers. Mia leaps off the page and into our hearts in this fast-paced journey between love and loss, fate and choice—along with dreams and reality. While being reminded that life, like fiction, is unpredictable, you won’t be able to put this book down.

SPECIALTY
Judge: Jerry Hancock

Finalist: I Cook in Color: Bright Flavors from My Kitchen and Around the World by Asha Gomez and Martha Hall Foose
Asha Gomez pairs the colorful flavors of Kerala with locally sourced ingredients to present gorgeous new interpretations of more traditional American fare. Chef Gomez defines Modern American cuisine by deconstructing familiar comfort dishes and reimagining them with a vibrant, worldly whimsical. Kaleidoscopic images leap off the page to bring these delightful recipes and their intriguing ingredients to life.

Winner: Cumberland Island: Footsteps in Time Stephen Doster, photography by Benjamin Galland
Stephen Doster incorporates both traditional and contemporary research methods to weave a rich historiography of Georgia’s coastal crown jewel. Doster uses a wealth of primary sources and archeological artifacts to trace the island’s ancestry from its unique geography and prehistory through its Gilded Age heyday, to its current status as one of our region’s pristine gems. Photographer Benjamin Galland’s intimate panoramas document Cumberland Island’s natural beauty in all its breathtaking splendor. Together, Doster and Galland manage to present Cumberland Island as not only a regional treasure, but as a living, breathing natural wonder of the south. 

YOUNG ADULT
Judge: Aaron Levy

Finalist: Dan Unmasked by Chris Negron
Dan Unmasked is a fun, funny, heart wrenching tale featuring real friends grappling with the ultimate test of their friendship. It’s for that not-so-rare boy and girl who love baseball and comic books and super heroes… only to realize sometimes real heroes don’t have super powers. Sometimes the most effective super power in the ‘ole utility belt is the power of story.

Winner: Dear Justyce by Nic Stone
Dear Justyce is an amazing companion novel to Stone’s multi-award winning YA book Dear Martin. Dear Justyce is not a continuation of Justyce McAllister’s story. It craftily casts Justyce as the friend of a new fantastically realized protagonist, Quan, who happens to write letters to Justyce from jail. This is a gritty and hauntingly real story about survival, poverty and violence that must be told. Today. Now. Stone does a great job balancing the criticism of the school and justice system, leaving enough grey area space for authentic discussion after readers finish the book. Bravo!

2020 Judges’ Statements

BIOGRAPHY

Judge: Vincent Coppola

Finalist: David Cady, Religion of Fear: The True Story of the Church of God of the Union Assembly 

A timely look at how charismatic leaders and their cults take root in the fertile soil in the United States. Religion of Fear is the multigenerational story of a tiny breakaway Pentecostal sect led by an illiterate Appalachian preacher, C.T. Pratt, and his descendants, spread over the twentieth century to include 15,000 members in 19 states. Like Jim Jones and Charlie Manson, the Pratts exploit fear, insecurity and utter neediness to control and extract millions of dollars from their impoverished congregants. Happily, there is no Jonestown or mass murder in this story. Instead, a minor miracle: a third-generation descendant of Pratt cleanses and restores the faith community.

Winner: John D. Duncan & Sandra L. Underwood, The Showy Town of Savannah: The Story of the Architect William Jay 

The odyssey of the brilliant and little-known 19th-century British architect William Jay is the lens through which the oppressive weight of money, religion, tradition, politics, ambition and ego undermine the success, and ultimately, the survival of an artistic soul. Savannah, Georgia, that jewel box of a city, is the canvas in which Jay’s brief creative sally (1817- 1822) into a nascent United States is depicted. Jay’s surviving Savannah structures designed in the Regency style (described as an “uncongenial blossom on American soil”) provide the foundation upon which this well-written, informative and thoroughly researched book is built. A tour de force.

CHILDREN’S BOOK

Judge: Shanda McCloskey

Finalist: Denene Millner, Illustrated by Gladys Jose, Fresh Princess 

Fresh Princess is a story inspired by Will Smith, The Fresh Prince. As a fan of the referenced 90’s show, I LOVED this “fresh” female spin! Destiny, the main character, moves to a new city, but it hurts to leave behind her old kingdom. It takes real bravery to open to her heart to new people, places, and things–and that’s exactly what we get to see her do! I was especially moved by the last page where Destiny is soaking up a glorious and memorable moment with her new friends.

Winner: Tanya Valentine, Illustrated by Jorge Martin, Little Taco Truck 

Little Taco Truck is the cleverest story about accepting and making room for everyone! The main character, a tiny taco truck, is worried that folks won’t see him or like him as much since a bunch of new food trucks (of different flavors and sizes) now crowd his favorite street. Valentine found a perfectly kid-friendly way to touch on issues of insecurities around change, feeling angry, and making friends that are different from you. Brava!

COOKBOOK

Judge: Todd Richards

Finalist: Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin, The New Pie: Modern Techniques for the Classic American Dessert 

I believe there is an unintended consequence in The New Pie by Chris and Paul. Their modern pies will quickly become American classics. They may not be seen on every window sill, on the floorboard of a Chevy or at Little League fundraisers. Pies like Blueberry Blues will be the “new” break up pie or getting married pie, stacking two high while taking an Uber to a one-bedroom apartment party pie. As always, very classy.

Winner: Whitney Otawka, The Saltwater Table: Recipes from The Coastal South 

Whitney Otawka’s cookbook The Saltwater Table forever stamps Cumberland Island as a mainstay of Georgia, and now the national food scene. Unlike some chefs’ cookbooks, where beautiful pictures outweigh content and functional recipes, The Saltwater Table cookbook is not just a coffee table book. It’s a practical and delicious guide of coastal living and showcases vegetables and their textural importance to really tasty dishes. This is the hot sauce great cookbooks are made of.

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY 

Judge: Roger Johns

Finalist: Joshilyn Jackson, Never Have I Ever 

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like, and I mean really feel like, to be under the thumb of a highly skilled professional blackmailer, then read Never Have I Ever and you’ll find out. In a story that made me squirm from the get-go, Joshilyn Jackson puts her protagonist in the crosshairs of a blackmailer who believes she is an agent of fate, an avenging angel anointed by destiny to extract payment and penance from those with hidden sins in their past. Is there anything more chilling than a psychologically astute predator who can predict your actions and reactions, who understands how the fan-dance of revelation and threat can induce heart-pounding panic and paralyzing dread, who believes her own actions are justified and compelled by the moral infrastructure of the universe? Is there anything more riveting than an intricate battle of wits between a good person with everything to lose and an evil person who plays the game as if she has nothing to lose? With her exquisitely crafted characters and her razor-sharp insights into human nature, Joshilyn Jackson kept me anxious and afraid, right down to the quivering tips of my sympathetic nerves, all the way to the very end.

Winner: Brian Panowich, Like Lions 

Like Lions is a powerful book that offers the reader an unflinching, sometimes heartbreaking, look into the workings of an insular culture as it takes its first unsteady steps away from its bred-in-the-bone traditions of lawlessness, corruption, and epic violence. Through the eyes of Clayton Burroughs, sheriff of a rural county in the Georgia mountains and heir apparent to a merciless crime family, we get a front-row seat to the winner-take-all conflict between those with a vested interest in maintaining the dark status quo and the courageous people willing to endure any danger on their way to a brighter future. Change is never easy, and there’s nothing like the prospect of sweeping change to bring out the best and worst in people, to expose secret lives and unexpected alliances, to force moral compromise onto the shoulders of the most principled of leaders, and to give those with a brave heart and a strong will the chance to model physical and emotional courage for the people they love. In Like Lions, Brian Panowich gives us a wrenching, but ultimately hopeful, and very intimate picture of the internal and external battles that are always stirred up by the winds of change.

ESSAY COLLECTION

Judge: André Joseph Gallant

Finalist: LaRue Cook, Man in the (Rearview) Mirror: That Time I Left Corporate America, Became An Uber Driver, and Lived to Write About It 

An earnest tenderness fills each page of Man in the (Rearview) Mirror. A reader learns fast that this is the result of a writer’s careful ability to listen. Accepting ears are also the hallmark of a good driver, which is how LaRue Cook collected the stories he collates in this book. They came to him from the road—the paved runway that propels so many American stories—in the form of Uber and Lyft rides. Each vignette opens the door into a different life, a different story, and Cook uses the opportunity to question choices made on his own journey. He’s less tender with himself, but that’s the mark of a smart writer and a caring human.

Winner: Megan Volpert, Boss Broad 

Boss Broad is a deeply personal work of pop culture criticism in which the art one loves inspires, and scuffles with, our identities. Volpert writes in the engrossing, risk-taking fashion of rock criticism’s heyday of the 1960s and 70s; she’s unafraid to bend or pause her narrative if it will allow for another heap of context. Bruce Springsteen, leader of the celebrity spectres Volpert channels in her book, served as a medium for old, weird Americans whose world collapsed during deindustrialization. Volpert performs a similar role, but draws from diverse experiences, including her own, all the while hoping that art might change the world.

FIRST NOVEL

Judge: Xhenet Aliu

Finalist: Jessica Handler, The Magnetic Girl 

Oftentimes, with historical fiction, I’ve found the impetus for the story more fascinating than the reimagining of it. Not so with The Magnetic Girl. While Lulu’s mystical powers may have been fraudulent, her magnetism certainly isn’t–under Handler’s unwavering, voice-driven, evocative prose, Lulu proves to be an irresistible heroine. A less gifted writer may have been content to let the oddity of the real-life story of Lulu–an adolescent girl in post-Civil War Georgia compelled by her father to produce shows demonstrating remarkable (and dishonest) feats of her electrical powers–produce the sparks on the page, so to speak, but Handler instead uses this as an access point into the more nuanced, compelling story beneath. The power Lulu wields on the stage, where she can beguile subjects and hurl grown men across the stage, is one in which she desperately wants to believe; the increasing dissonance of her performance with her reality, full of familial heartache and betrayals and the mere fact of girlhood in the nineteenth-century South, is where the real drama unfolds. Poignant, layered, and downright fun to read, The Magnetic Girl is a thoroughly Georgian book that should captivate readers everywhere. 

Winner: Anissa Gray, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls 

Anissa Gray’s novel not only takes on the challenge of writing about family but masterfully renders the paradoxes native to the subject: how can those whom we’ve known longer, more intimately, and more passionately than anyone else in our worlds remain so mysterious to us? The rotating points-of-view of each chapter, handed off like a baton among the Butler siblings, constantly reorients the reader’s perspectives and alliances, resulting in a novel of incredible moral complexity, wherein characters inflict and endure pain in ways that are cruel and yet tragically human. Viola, the middle Butler sister, struggles with a literal eating disorder, the mechanics of which are described vividly in a particularly painful chapter relatively early on in the book. But the novel’s title refers not just to Viola’s disordered eating but to the hollow, hungry spaces in each of the Butler women, whose traumas threaten to be inherited by the next generation. Despite their individual and shared wounds–intersected with and compounded by the social forces that act in particularly unforgiving ways on contemporary African-Americans–there’s an enduring tenderness among the Butlers that made me eager to accompany them from the first page to the last. As with my own sisters, despite the many moments of grief caused by and shared with them, I missed the Butler family terribly when it was time to bid farewell.

HISTORY

Judge: Kaye Lanning Minchew

Finalist: Akila Sankar McConnell, A Culinary History of Atlanta 

Akila Sankar McConnell focuses on the foods that Atlantans have eaten from the city’s early days as Terminus and Marthasville and brings the journey to present days. She looks at the popular ingredients, dishes, cookbooks, and restaurants. She acknowledges the impact on which African-Americans and large groups of immigrants have had on the food history while also reminding us of wonderful foods served at Rich’s department store and favorites still served every day at The Varsity. The book pays homage to great meals prepared by mothers, grandmothers, and household help while other sections highlight the importance of farmer’s markets and the increasing prominence of foreign restaurants in the city. McConnell also looks at foods which were once popular in Atlanta, such as possum and wild game, and includes some recipes and menus. This extensively researched book will make you think more about the foods you eat in Atlanta and how the food is rooted in the history of the area.

Winner: G. Wayne Clough, Things New & Strange: A Southerner’s Journey Through the Smithsonian Collections 

Wayne Clough analyzes the history of South Georgia as he takes us on a tour through some of the museums and galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, home to many of America’s greatest treasures. While he served as the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the former president of Georgia Tech challenged staff members to help him find artifacts that shed light on the history of his native Coffee County and South Georgia. He examined a wide variety of objects that are housed in the Smithsonian museums. Artifacts include fossils, arrowheads, beads, and pottery shards from the days of native Americans, preserved specimens of birds, insects, mammals, plants, rocks, and meteorites that crashed to earth decades ago. He looked for physical evidence of earlier cultures and studied the Gullahs and Geechees of coastal Georgia. He concluded by looking for evidence of South Georgia arts and artists in the Smithsonian and spotlighted the former President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter. Clough reminds us that things that we take for granted, such as Georgia’s red clay, may contain valuable mineral minerals and have significance, which helps explain the development of our area. Things New & Strange also reminds us that we have lost many species of birds, animals, and plants over the years: our forebears found things in South Georgia that no longer survive. This richly illustrated book puts the history of South Georgia and the Smithsonian collections on display and should inspire all of us to periodically visit museums, including the Smithsonian and search the digitized collections, which continue to grow online, for items which document our lives today. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Things New & Strange reminds us of the fun we can have when we look at our world with a sense of wonder.

INSPIRATIONAL 

Judge: Kaitlin Curtice

Finalist: Carl McColman, Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can’t Be Taught (And Why That’s Okay) 

McColman writes a book about grief, silence, and the provoking and important lessons we continually learn throughout our lives. With vulnerable and honest stories, he reminds us of what it means to be human, and how we experience sacredness in hidden places and often when we least expect it. This is a book about relationships, trust, and what it means to be human both to ourselves and to one another.

Winner: Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others 

Taylor’s newest book Holy Envy is a vulnerable and curious examination of the way we relate to one another through a religious lens. Not straying from her own Christian background, Taylor takes the reader on a journey of understanding how we can better value one another as human beings. This book inspires and provokes, leading us on our own journey of asking big questions about what we believe and why we believe it.

LITERARY FICTION

Judge: Roberta George

Finalist: Susan Rebecca White, We Are All Good People Here 

Friendship over a long period of time is probably one of the hardest things to write about, and yet Ms. White does an excellent job of giving us a true picture of a friendship between two women during the early 60s. How do our political choices define us, and how do we break from the past when those choices lead to destruction? The reader follows these two women during those eventful times and sees what their choices mean to them and to the people they love.  

Winner: Zoe Fishman, Invisible as Air 

If you’ve never understood what opiates can do to some people, here’s a good explanation. Sylvie Snow is a typical mother and wife with a job, trying to do all the tasks that are expected of her. And for her, underneath all the daily problems, is the unresolved sadness of losing a still-born daughter three years earlier. She takes one small white pill from her husband Paul’s prescription—he’s laid up with a broken ankle and doesn’t like how they make him feel—and the effect is immediate and wonderful. Suddenly, she is able to handle everything with a smile: the stress of a bar mitzvah for her son Teddy, Paul’s whine from the couch, and even the loss of her job. She promises herself that these pills are temporary fixes.

Along with the excellent writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens, in a way, this novel is an object lesson to all us, that even with the best of intentions of only using the pills for a limited time, one can become addicted. It also comes with the realization that the other members of a family and even strangers want to help in times of need.

A very real story that has the reader wanting Sylvie to find a solution to her problem, and yet it is also a cautionary tale for our time with all its emphasis on quick fixes from doctors and medicines.

MEMOIR 

Judge: James Abbot

Finalist: Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making 

From the pages of The Man They Wanted Me to Be, Jared Yates Sexton emerges as not only a courageous survivor of childhood trauma, but also an exemplar of how to live life in these troubled times. Neglected or bullied by person after person—parents, stepfathers, coaches, classmates, even a professor—Sexton endured, forgave, and labored to understand. His memoir lucidly explicates the ruinous form of masculinity that is responsible for stunting and twisting too many of our lives, and in its extraordinary narrative of reconciliation between father and son, culminating in the delivery of a eulogy that did not shy from describing “how a boy could come into this world with the best of intentions and somehow get so very lost,” Sexton’s book strongly encourages us to accept that, in fact, we are able to choose, individually and as a society, to live a different way.

Winner: Heather Christle, The Crying Book 

Edmond Jabès wrote, “You will follow the book, whose every page is an abyss where the wing shines with the name.” He might have been describing Heather Christle’s indelible memoir, The Crying Book, for on each page Christle opens an abyss before us, only to carry us across it on shining wings. The Crying Book is a record of tears, five years of tears collected in not quite 400 journal entries: tears upon the death of a friend, at the birth of a child, for the sorrows of others, from tenacious despair. Reading this book, experiencing it, we cannot but ache, yet it is Christle’s singular achievement that we want to ache. It’s as if Christle has taken us by the hand and led us inside a literary work of tender beauty and bruising truth, where “the landscape suddenly reveals itself in layers,” as Christle writes, and we become alive to a “dimension always present,” but “not always seen.” It’s the rare book that can bestow upon its readers the saving consolation of hope. The Crying Book is one of those rare books.

POETRY CHAPBOOK

Judge: Cynthia Robinson Young

Finalist: Diana Anhalt, Walking Backward 

Diana Anhalt’s collection Walking Backward contains poems that are like doors opening to the stories of life. She seamlessly walks the reader backward through those doors, recalling family histories in poems such as “Family Name,” when such experiences like migration might easily mean loss of family identity. It is in her lyrical lines such as “I lie face down/in bed, my naked back your keyboard,” that Anhalt’s work displays her ear for the music of love, the music of loss, and when she writes “When my love died, life moved to a street/my feet can’t find,” we are eager to accept her invitation to take that walk backward with her.

Winner: Clela Reed, Silk 

Clela Reed has created a chapbook that not only educates the readers but haunts us in reflection. She has skillfully woven history, facts, family, and even a speculative future into a tight collection clothed in the fabric of silk. The poems possess an almost three-dimensional quality, pulling the reader into its softness and its strength, and by the end, one feels wrapped in the collection’s cocoon. From the parachutes of war to the scarf that ended Isadora Duncan’s life, the reader of Silk will never think about this subject the same way again.

POETRY FULL-LENGTH

Judge: Nicholas Goodly

Finalist: Edward Wilson, In a Rich Country 

Edward Wilson achieves one of the most basic duties of poetry. His poems take small moments and spin them into art. Time slows, a memory replays into infinity. This collection uses words to fill us with the magic and grace of everyday life. This book places the richness of this country right into your hands.

Winner: Malcolm Tariq, Heed the Hollow

Malcolm Tariq takes an unflinching look at the politics of his own body. Its history, miraculous present condition, and possible futures. At once sexy, whole, confessional and investigative, Heed the Hollow insists on being handled with care, on taking its time. These poems insist on becoming a part of you. These poems do not wait for approval, these poems knock down the door to be let in.

ROMANCE

Judge: Sally Kilpatrick

Finalist: Wendy Wax, My Ex-Best Friend’s Wedding

While My Ex-Best Friend’s Wedding is really a story of mothers and daughters and best friends who reconcile, it’s undergirded by a romance forty years in the making. Three different POVs add richness to a novel that explores the complexity of relationships both romantic and platonic.

Winner: Tracy Solheim, Shot in the Dark 

From the very first page, you’re drawn into this romantic suspense that takes you from the African savanna to the White House. Solheim deftly interweaves a romance of opposites attract with a suspense plot about poaching. This book has action, romance, and humor, along with the pathos of two characters wrestling with who they really want to be only to realize they are each their best selves when they are together.

YOUNG ADULT

Judge: Lisa Lewis Tyre

Finalist: Laura Silverman, You Asked for Perfect

You Asked For Perfect by Laura Silverman is full of rich characters, smart dialogue, and the soul-crushing, anxiety-producing pressure to succeed that so many real-life teens face. Perfectionists will recognize themselves in the pages of Silverman’s novel and will hopefully walk away with a fresh perspective. Heartfelt and relatable!

Winner: Nic Stone, Jackpot

Excellence! Nic Stone’s Jackpot has everything–a great story, characters that leap off the page, VOICE, a thought-provoking message, humor and heart. I loved every second I spent with Rico Danger!

2019 Judges’ Statements

BIOGRAPHY

Judge: Ted Geltner

Finalist: Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden
An American Odyssey is a deeply researched, well-crafted, and thoughtful look at an intriguing figure in the history of American art. The narrative arc of Romare Bearden’s life, from a, at times, creatively stifled aspiring artist, to an innovative master of a new form of art, to a respected champion of new voices, is well chronicled in this intriguing biography. The book weaves the life of its subject into the greater panorama of the culture and politics in which he lived, as all great biographies do. 

Winner: Ruby Lal, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan 

In order to tell the real story of the life of Nur Jahan, author Ruby Lal had to sift through more than 400 years of myth, legend and historical interpretation to find the hidden kernels of truth with which to craft her narrative. In Empress, she both corrects the historical record on a fascinating figure and creates a compelling account that is gripping from beginning to end. Lal has a mesmerizing subject at the center of her story and shows readers, through masterful storytelling, the characteristics that allowed her subject to rise to a level of power that was beyond rare for a woman in the times and culture in which she lived her life. The author chose a gargantuan research task here, forcing herself to grapple with a record filled with traps and holes, and managed to navigate it skillfully and produce an excellent, enriching tale.

CHILDREN’S BOOK 

Judge: Jackson Pearce

Finalist: Shanda McCloskey, Doll-E 1.0

DOLL-E 1.0 is the story of a girl named Charlotte who is a tinkerer, engineer, builder, inventor, and dreamer. She prefers her toys with a side of coding, so when her mother gets her doll, Charlotte decides to improve the toy by turning it into a robot with delightful Frankenstein vibes. The story is fun and engaging and the art is cheerful and fussy in a way that reflects Charlotte’s fast-paced thinking. DOLL-E 1.0 blends technology, make-believe play, and creativity together to create a STEM-y story sure to excite and engage young audiences.

Winner: Deborah Wiles, A Long Line of Cakes  

A Long Line of Cakes is the story of Emma Alabama Lane Cake and her big, boisterous family of do-good bakers, who travel from town to town setting up bakeries in communities who could do with a pastry or ten. All the moving has made Emma’s heart wary, and when they arrive in Aurora County she’s determined not to make a single friend who she’d just have to abandon when they move on. A Long Line of Cakes reminded me of the movies Chocolat and Big Fish in the best of ways. I loved the big, tight-knight family, and Wiles deftly captures the endless feeling of summer in the Deep South— as well as the inevitable, might-as-well, barefoot joy of childhood friendship. This book reminded me of cooking with my grandmother, broken-in floral aprons, the cloudy dust of flour sifters, and recipes memorized rather than written down. A truly lovely story!

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY

Judge: Maggie Mitchell

Finalist: Roger Johns, River of Secrets

River of Secrets kicks off with a violent murder, plunging readers into a mystery deftly combining political intrigue and procedural detail against a backdrop of racial tension in Baton Rouge, LA. Detective Wallace Hartman pursues leads relentlessly, though a childhood friendship links her to a key suspect and she is increasingly aware that there is almost no one she can trust. Fast-paced and tense, this novel offers carefully crafted twists en route to its surprising conclusion, leaving us wanting more of Detective Hartman.

Winner: Karin Slaughter, Pieces of Her

Pieces of Her is one of Karin Slaughter’s most satisfying novels yet. At its heart, it’s about a mother and daughter—a talented but directionless millennial daughter, a mother with too many secrets. An intricate plot follows the adventures of both women, reaching back in time to trace the mother’s involvement in a cult-like radical organization while decades later the daughter gets caught up in a dangerous search for the truth about her parents—and herself. The suspense never lets up, but ultimately it’s the psychological complexity of these characters that makes this novel so riveting.

ESSAY COLLECTION

Judge: Anjali Enjeti 

Finalist: Megan Volpert, Straight into Darkness: One Tom Petty Redemption Song

Straight into Darkness is a music historian and pop culture aficionado’s dream — a deeply visceral, exhaustive, and eloquent appreciation for one of the greatest contemporary musicians of our time, Tom Petty. Volpert meticulously traces Petty’s quest for originality and autonomy throughout his decades-long career. Petty was a gifted musician who thought outside of the box and challenged conventional norms. And Volpert is a gifted critic, whose tribute makes for an illustrious addition to the genre of music criticism.

Winner: André Joseph Gallant, A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster

A High Low Tide is an evocative and lilting ode to the oyster of the southeast Georgia coastline and the art and science of oyster farming. This rigorously researched book takes readers to a resplendent tidal kingdom, where oysters are royalty, and unspools an intriguing tale about the life cycle of the mollusk, and the people and the landscape that cultivate, nurture, and honor these local treasures. Sublime prose unveils a dedicated community in tune with the nature and the evolution of this exotic and mysterious creature, with Gallant as our generous and insightful guide.  

FIRST NOVEL

Judge: Anna Schachner

Finalist: Spencer Wise, The Emperor of Shoes

In his funny, ambitious, and timely debut, Spenser Wise skillfully layers conflict, both familial and political, while never sacrificing great storytelling.  When narrator Alex Cohen moves to southern China to run the family shoe factory, a Jewish business empire long controlled by his contemptuous father, he doesn’t expect to learn some of the family business’s shady secrets, including the inhumane factory conditions. And he doesn’t expect to fall in love with Ivy, a factory worker with her eye on democracy who can’t quite shake her sad memories of Tiananmen Square. More than just an examination of loyalty—its costs and compromises—this novel confronts social justice, globalization, and shifting generational value systems. Wise takes on such thematic heft all the while fully entertaining the reader and creating a “world” made very real and accessible. The Emperor of Shoes rules. 

Winner: Xhenet Aliu, Brass

With an edgy, energetic, comic voice that never wanes, Xhenet Aliu’s Brass offers living, breathing characters that you can’t help but love, even as they make bad choices in trying to navigate their hard-scrabble lives. As the central storyline, Elsie and Luljeta’s mother/daughter relationship is contentious and sometimes surly, but resilient and passionate, too. Their complicated bond evolves against the backdrop of economically fraught Waterbury, Connecticut in the 1990s, a setting Aliu renders with gritty details.  While the characters yearn for escape, they are entrenched in Waterbury’s Albanian immigrant community, one that has transferred its dreams from Albania to the US without much success. Aliu not only beautifully weaves together character, multiple points of view, and plot (a mystery of a lost father included), her understanding of the downtrodden avoids pity and simplicity. What a fantastic debut. Better still, what a fantastic book.

HISTORY

Judge: Carla Gerona

Finalist: Phil Hudgins and Jessica Phillips, Travels with Foxfire: Stories of People, Passions, and Practices from Southern Appalachia

What do water dowsers, ginseng hunters, and outdoor privies have in common?  These people and places are virtually extinct, but if you want to find them look no further than Travels with Foxfire.  Since 1972, Foxfire has been keeping Appalachian history and culture alive through its educational interventions, historical sites, and innovative publications that preserve the rural way of life.  In this new compendium, Phil Hudgins and Jessica Phillips travel across the Georgia, Carolina, and Tennessee mountains conducting interviews and collecting colorful stories in order to “capture and preserve as much as possible the culture and wisdom of the people of this region.”  Despite indoor plumbing, gas stoves, and electrification, some of the people of Appalachia continue to practice older traditions and remember them fondly. Every chapter will make you laugh; some might make you cry. Authors Hudgins and Phillips remember and interview members of their own families as well as a wide array of other memory keepers.  Historian and artist Ann Miller Woodford, whose family moved to the North Carolina Mountains following a 1912 lynching in Forsyth County, describes working with her father and attending the one-room segregated schoolhouse. Medicine woman Eve Miranda continues to collect herbs, even after losing her home. Former moonshine runners in Dawson County, Georgia claim that the origins of NASCAR racing began along the Etowah River.  And Sherryl Major remembers letting all her friends sneak into her father’s drive-in movie theatre. By 1984 her father closed the Drive-In, but Majors reopened it in 2014. As the authors say, in southern Appalachia many like to think of themselves as “individualistic mountain folks who cling to tradition like bark to a tree.” This book does a very nice job of collecting and presenting the history of these tenacious people.

Winner: Joseph Crespino, Atticus Finch: The Biography

Atticus Finch was a character in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  So how can a historian write a biography of this fictional persona?  In Atticus Finch: The Biography, historian Joseph Crespino draws on newspaper editorials and newly released primary sources to make a convincing case that Lee modeled the imaginary Atticus Finch on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee.  A lawyer, newspaper editor and Democratic politician from the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, A.C. Lee, however, was no justice warrior. While Lee’s father did not appreciate unruly lynchings, he also defended segregation.  In fact, Lee’s father more closely resembled the racist protagonist in her first book, Go Set a Watchman, published posthumously in 2015.  Crespino highlights how Lee could not “reconcile her love of small-town southern life – and of the values and principles of her father that grew out of it—with the commitment to racial hierarchy that defined both her hometown and her father.” If Atticus Finch represented Lee’s father, he represented her father as he could never be.  But this book is much more than a biography of a fictional character as seen through the lens of his celebrated daughter. Crespino shows that Lee’s struggles, in her book and in her life, represented a troubled region, country, and world during a period of Cold War and Civil Rights. While Lee claimed that her bestselling novel was a “love story pure and simple,” Crespino sets the story — and the story behind the story — in a local, political, and international landscape.  Moving from Monroeville to New York, and beyond, Crespino touches on the KKK, Martin Luther King, and a film audience at Cannes that questions actor Gregory Peck about Atticus Finch’s authenticity. Georgia writer, Joseph Crespino, has provided an incredibly rich portrait of these troubled and changing times.

 LITERARY FICTION

Judge: Stacia Pelletier

Finalist: Tayari Jones, An American Marriage       

Tayari Jones’s acclaimed new novel offers a clear-eyed, searing account of ordinary lives unmade by tragedy and injustice—and slowly remade by courage and honesty. An American Marriage is a love story, a portrait of a marriage, and an exploration of the American Dream against the backdrop of the twenty-first-century prison industrial complex. It’s also a narrative about parents and adult children and what it really means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. A powerhouse of a book that richly deserves the numerous accolades it’s received. 

Winner: Roberta George, The Day’s Heat

This novel quietly stole the day—and this reviewer’s heart. Lee James is a young Lebanese American mother married to a white plumber and eking out a living in a small south Georgia town in the early 1960s. When local Catholic priest Father Palmer loses a tooth in an accident, Lee’s quick thinking saves the tooth and launches a series of events that will turn her life—and the entire town—upside down. A page-turner, a love story where we root for the heroine to leave the guy(s) and move forward alone, and a theologically insightful tale, The Day’s Heat deserves a broader hearing than it’s received. Pregnant Lee leaps off the page, fully realized, at least for this reader; and the story, while never preachy, challenges us to think hard about motherhood, race, and moral obligation in a time beset by powerful external social forces. An unassuming triumph. 

MEMOIR

Judge: Jessica Handler

Finalist: James C. Abbot, Jr. The Burdens of Aeneas
This epistolary memoir investigates the age-old Southern question, “who are your people?” with an inventive and fascinating approach. A meditation on fatherhood, community, and the classics, from the ancient Greeks to Bruce Springsteen.  

Winner: Kelly Beard, An Imperfect Rapture
An insightful and engrossing memoir about wrestling with the demons of belief, family, and identity. Beard elegantly crafts her story of self-definition and emergence from a complicated past.

POETRY CHAPBOOK

Judge: Nicholas Goodly

Finalist: Cynthia Robinson Young, Migration 
Cynthia Robinson Young’s Migration could be considered a historical document. These poems speak to and for a lineage of strong black women, their journeys and plights through time. Reading this collection not only brings us closer to the lives of this family but also serves as an education in the history of America. Through Young’s earnest exploration of these oppressed and underserved figures in her family, their narratives are given a chance to live, their voices heard, and their spirits seen. Cynthia Robinson Young allows the oppressed to speak. The violence of colonialism is exposed. The poems honor their subjects, through title and content. 

The reader witnesses how trauma ripples through a family and how both pain and strength are inherited. This collection does incredible and ambitious work. It unites a family that has endured this country’s history, a dynamic telling of a people refusing to be erased. I was incredibly inspired by Young’s ability to use the craft of writing to hold space for black women through history and was moved by the strength and effectiveness of the poems.

Winner: Julia Caroline Knowlton, The Café of Unintelligible Desire
The Café of Unintelligible Desire is a quiet place. The poems inside move slowly, the pacing is lyrical, and their shape is spacious and full of breath. Knowlton uses the space she’s created and takes her time to deliver stirring, even overwhelming emotional work. Although the tone seems deceptively casual or musing, nothing about these poems are idle. These poems toil over grief, sit with regret, confront melancholy, all through a clear and precise voice. The Café of Unintelligible Desire may appear sparse in word count, but offers room for immense transformation. Lillies turn into doves, sorrow into stones, and children are disappearing. The form and content of the poems, then, are efficient. They perform with tremendous grace and agility. The impact of the poems strike and linger. I am thankful for these poems. The Café of Unintelligible Desires is a brief but beautiful journey into quiet feelings. Knowlton has put her readers in a room with everything that needs to be felt, serves exacting and honest words in a warm cup, and I am grateful to be there.

POETRY FULL-LENGTH BOOK

Judge: Rosalie Moffett

Finalist: Travis Denton, My Stunt Double
This book opens with the lines, “When I look up at the red dot in the sky… All I can think of is TV news…” And that formula of When I look —> All I can think operates as a trapdoor key to view a stunt-double world, a stand-in, carefully delineated, achingly familiar, but a world with the surreal freedom to adhere to another set of rules. Certain inescapable forces—the forward-motion of time, the unpredictable nature of reality, the absence of those who are gone—are undone. In this book, the world steps out of itself. Just as the “I” steps into “he” and the individual becomes “the man,” we step back to watch how the inhabitants of this cityscape are dear, are particular and flawed, are performing feats of regular and magnificent existence.  

Winner: Mario Chard, Land of Fire 
Mario Chard’s outstanding debut, Land of Fire, examines the ideas of citizen and alien, of national borders and of other, stranger ways we encounter and escape the confines that keep us.The book revolves around the series “Caballero”, a mythologization of the fate of a group of undocumented immigrants whose van crashed—according to differing news reports, either from swerving to miss a horse, or due to the driver molesting a passenger. This poem hinges on the command say, as in “Say it was a horse. / That the horse watched / the three ton van / roll…” That the command exists with one foot in imagine and one foot in declare gets at the book’s heart: an uneasy and reverent reckoning with what breaking silence brings into being. In short, Land of Fire is a careful, faceted meditation on what is sayable, what is unspeakable, and what barriers can be crossed with acts of witness and acts of imagination. It is a book that every day becomes more necessary.

ROMANCE

Judge: Nicki Salcedo

Finalist: Ricki Schultz, Switch and Bait

Schultz takes a look at modern romance in a fast-paced story about second chances in the big city. Falling in love is never easy, but Schultz shows us that it can be fun and funny.

Winner: Sally Kilpatrick, Oh My Stars

Kilpatrick takes great care when creating her characters and even greater care with the story. We are transported in a world with flawed people who haven’t lost their hearts. Even the most hardened reader will fall in love with Oh My Stars. A fine piece of literature representing the best of romance and the best of the South.

SHORT STORY COLLECTION

Judge: Kerry Neville

Finalist: Andy Plattner, Dixie Luck

On the surface, the characters in Andy Plattner’s collection, Dixie Luck, are failed gamblers, many of the horse racing world and on the run from disappointments, debts, failed marriages, and frustrated ambitions. These are characters who have mostly ceded their dreams to time’s passage, to an understanding that they will not win big in life or love, and so they offer honest and clear-eyed appraisals of what they want from the life that is left to them. But their hopes, for more modest windfalls mediated by experience, are still part of their hearts’ desires.

Winner: Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk

The stories in Sabrina Orah Mark’s collection, Wild Milk, are surreal, subversive, and exquisitely tender. It is as if we are watching a family’s vaudeville act with funny and surprising sleights of hand: what we see and what we feel are revealed to be something entirely different—weirder and more wonderful revelations. These cryptic and fantastic prose-poem stories enact a rare kind of magic: complex puzzles that challenge the brain and muscle-building exercises that buffer the heart. While Mark’s universe is the ordinary landscape of families, often contending with motherhood, she allows us to see that the family is a holy and mystical constellation as well.    

SPECIALTY BOOK

Judge: Laura Vela 

Finalist: Jimmy Carter, The Paintings of Jimmy Carter 

The Paintings of Jimmy Carter depicts the president’s fifty favorite paintings. The book showcases Carter’s evolution as a painter, while immortalizing memories of his family, childhood, travels with The Carter Center, landscapes, and still lives. The paintings are accompanied by a written narrative from the former president. There is an overarching sense of humility that reminds the reader of a simpler time. Carter’s zest for life is contagious and inspiring.

Winner: Todd Richards, Soul: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes

Todd Richards’ Soul is a celebration of the beautiful simplicity of American southern food, its complex history, and the exciting possibilities for the future of old traditions. The photography is stark and fresh. Mouthwatering dishes are flanked by reminders of southern food’s communal roots, ice cold beers and the congregation of family and friends. Punctuated by anecdotes of “summertime sweetness” and the community table, Richards is not afraid to talk about race and bring it to the forefront. In a field that has largely been dominated by white men trained in French cooking, Soul portrays soul food, rooted in slavery, as haute cuisine. From oxtail potpies to sea urchin with smoked tomato broth, Richards pays homage to southern classics using his “no rules” philosophy to craft recipes that are inspired, informative, elegant, and humble in origin. 

YOUNG ADULT
Judge, Jaye Robin Brown

Finalist: Will Walton, I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain

I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain is an apt title for Walton’s lovely novel. The story, told through poetry, fragments, lyrics, stream of thought, and prose shows us main character, Avery’s life. The progress is not always linear, and much like our thought patterns, we jump from moment to moment along with the main character. It is a book that doesn’t shy from tough topics like alcoholism, death, and the love and hurt a parent can cause through addiction. But it also touches on gentler themes like coming out and finding yourself mirrored in a good way through the eyes of your best friend. Walton’s structure and intelligence in his choices shines through. If a novel could be a poem, Walton has found a way to write it.

Winner: Rachael Allen, A Taxonomy of Love  

Taxonomy of Love, like the title implies, is indeed a love story, but not just between the two main characters. It is a love story to family, and life, and the growth that happens along the way. Over a six-year time span and through a collection of charts, emails, letters, and narrative, Allen carries us along and pulls us deep into the heart of her main characters, Spencer, who has Tourette’s Syndrome, and Hope, who has lost her best friend/older sister. The unique structure and longer time frame allow the reader to grow with Spencer and Hope in a way that is never forced but works for the novel and allows us to journey with them in a deeper way. What I particularly liked about this was the opportunity to see the reality of relationships. The push and pull. The tearing apart. The finding a way together. The pain that comes when we lose loved ones, are hurt by those supposed to be our friends, and the forgiveness we can find when we risk vulnerability. Taxonomy of Love is hopeful, truthful, and smart, which to me, embodies the essence of young adult literature.

2018 Judges’ Statements

CHILDREN’S BOOK 

Judge: Carmen Deedy 

Finalist: Dan Carlton, Ollie and the Wise Old Owl

This delightful story may rightly boast an economy of words. The repetitive nature of the story, along with a surprise ending, make Ollie and the Wise Old Owl a perfect bedtime read for younger children.

Winner: Vickie McEntire, Little Bird and Myrtle Turtle 

The tale of a character that cares for an unhatched egg––with surprising results––is not an uncommon theme in children’s literature. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, Oliver Butterworth’s The Enormous Egg, and Emily Gravett’s wickedly delightful, The Odd Egg, are among the most memorable of these adoption stories.

McEntire’s gentle wisdom in the treatment of this theme is worthy of commendation. When the bird asks its adoptive turtle mother if it belongs to her, her reply is simple, ” . . . you do not belong to me or anyone else. Your life belongs to the wind under your wings . . . “. These unselfish words reassure the young reader that the turtle, wanting only freedom and happiness for her young charge, is a marvelous parent. And the little bird is fortunate indeed to have her for a mother.

Vergona’s medium, in soft colored pencil, suits the story perfectly.

DETECTIVE MYSTERY

Judge: Lynn Chandler Willis 

Finalist: Maggie Toussaint, Dadgunmmit

Dadgummit is one of those little gems that’s full of surprises. Original to the core, the imagination that went into creating the characters and the plot line is one to be applauded. I’m not one that generally likes characters in a mystery with psychic abilities but, dadgummit, Toussaint makes this work, and it’s believable. It’s an epic battle of good vs. evil with varying threads weaving the paranormal, Cherokee folklore, energy vampires, friendship and family, into an engrossing tale. Dadgummit is the fourth book in the Dreamwalker Mystery series and features amateur sleuth Baxley Powell. Baxley is a worthy protagonist just trying to take a family vacation but is immediately pulled into a dead body investigation. Told in a straight forward first-person narrative, the novel surprises with a twist at the end. I imagine writing in first-person with a psychic narrator could be challenging but Toussaint makes Baxley authentic and a joy to read.

Winner: Roger Johns, Dark River Rising

It had me with the first two lines. Wallace Hartman had never seen a dead man move, but the guy in front of her was definitely dead, and definitely moving. He just wasn’t going anywhere. Wow! One of the best opening lines I’ve ever read. I knew from those few lines, I was going to finish this one. Roger Johns expertly pulls the reader into a world thick with atmosphere and nuance and populated by richly drawn characters. Lead detective Wallace Hartman is a fully fleshed out protagonist with flaws, determination, and a history that both holds her back and drives her forward. Supported by an expertly-drawn cast of characters, Johns’ debut novel is everything a good crime story should be and more.

FIRST NOVEL

Judge: Ravi Howard

Finalist:  Christopher Swann, Shadow of the Lions

Christopher Swann explores intriguing questions about homecomings to cherished places.  When Matthias Glass returns to his alma mater as a teacher, Shadow of the Lions shows moments where the residue of the past echo through the novel.  Some echoes bring solace while others bring conflict.  Swann deliver a spiritedness that includes moments of yearning and haunting in the lives of his characters.

Winner:  Peter McDade, The Weight of Sound

In The Weight of Sound, Peter McDade finds a range of well-honed voices to tell the story of a band from its inception through the many versions that follow.  Writing through an ensemble of narrators can be tricky, but the author finds a compelling mix that gives texture to this ensemble experience.  The narrative revolves as it moves forward, with lead players moving to the periphery as the supporting cast add their stories.   Through writing that delivers visual sharpness and emotional resonance, Peter McDade shows the music world from the studio, the stage, the after party, and the lonely stretches where these characters deal with inspiration, doubt, love, and the allegiances required to make their music last.

HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY

Judge: Melissa Cooper 

Finalist: Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.

The Color of Money looks to the history of black banking to examine the “financial fault line” between whites and blacks in America. Baradaran’s study covers much ground, from the post-Civil War era to the present-day. A thoroughly investigated account of black banks and the ever-elusive promise of black capitalism, The Color of Money uncovers how segregation, racism, and government credit policy cemented the racial wealth gap and guaranteed that the “history of black banking remains a story of struggle rather than triumph.”

Winner: Dawn Peterson, Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion.

Indians in the Family is an important and compelling history that explores the adoption of Native American youth by whites during the period of antebellum expansion, unveiling how Natives, and the whites who ultimately sought to displace them, used adoption to achieve divergent agendas. Peterson’s eloquent account draws upon archival records to piece together the various motives that inspired this phenomenon. Indians in the Family’s readers will find stories about whites who adopted Native children, and Native families and communities—stories that uniquely illuminate how “family,” nation-building, race-making, slavery, resistance, and expansion, factor in this this little-known chapter in America’s history. In the end, Peterson concludes, “For U.S. whites, the politics of adoption in post-Revolutionary North America was a family story that sought to mask the violence of U.S. territorial expansion, Indian dispossession, and African American servitude” while “For Native people, the placement of children within white homes was a way to support indigenous families and maintain indigenous sovereignty.”

INSPIRATIONAL 

Judge: Nicole Kearney 

Finalist: Candace L. Long, The Ancient Path to Creativity and Innovation: Where Left and Right Brains Meet

Both of these topics are of interest to me. The author provides a blueprint in 18 steps. I absolutely love and agree with the author’s sentiment that ideas can come from God. Her ability to ‘hear inspired ideas and act on them have assisted her clients and her tremendously. I’m thrilled that as she writes about faith, especially for creatives, she reminds them they must apply it. Faith without works is dead. Creatives and non-creatives will benefit tremendously by following the principles. They, along with the 18 steps and working faith will manifest one’s heart desires.

Winner: Deborah Malone, Blooming in Broken Places

Deborah brilliantly weaves her story of despair and being broken with four Biblical women. These women also find themselves in dark places. However, like Deborah, each using their faith, found a way out. The title chapters Keep on Blooming is encouraging. The application questions at the end of each chapter give the reader and opportunity to think about what they read, how it applies to their life and space to write their reflections. The book shares that message that having faith and seeking God allow you to heal your brokenness.

LITERARY FICTION

Judge: Gray Stewart

Honorable Mention: Daren Wang, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

Daren Wang’s debut novel, The Hidden Light of Northern Fires, is a page-turning historical romance that is epic in scope and ambitious in execution. The storyline unfolds across the entirety of the Civil War and involves an ensemble of characters across race, class, and gender lines as they navigate their way through this most perilous period of American history. The author knows his stuff. Sharp period detail resonates throughout the novel and Wang has a striking talent for maintaining tension from one chapter to the next. It’s a terrific read and a worthy addition to the contemporary canon of Civil War fiction.

Finalist: Anna Schachner, You and I and Someone Else 

In Anna Schachner’s debut novel, You and I and Someone Else, Frannie Lewis has absorbed the flaws of her parents intact yet listless marriage, and this derails her ability to have an authentic and honest romantic relationship with Jude, a baker grieving the loss of his son. As she hopes to find true intimacy, her father is diagnosed with cancer and she must cope with his decline and manage her mother’s disappointment–all while exploring a relationship with Jude that promises an escape from her parent’s dysfunction.

What begins as a buoyant southern family drama gradually becomes a narrative framed by emotional neglect and profound loss. The novel isn’t a downer, however; the heaviness is negated by Frannie’s wit and resiliency—not an easy thing to pull off. Moving and finely written, You and I and Someone Else is an admirable accomplishment. 

Winner: Man Martin, The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome 

Man Martin has won the Georgia Author of the Year Award twice before, once in 2008 for Days of the Endless Corvette, and again in 2012 for Paradise Dogs. His third novel, The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome, shows a seasoned author in full-command of his craft.

The storyline of this comic novel involves the descent and rebirth of its hapless cuckold protagonist, Bone King, a grammarian and English professor who has “unwisely given his heart to words.” Bone eventually learns to prioritize human connection over book-learning and to follow his heart in a wiser direction, regardless of the obstacles before him.

The storyline is cleverly presented through twenty-six chapters which represent the letters of the alphabet and also correspond to entries in his doctoral dissertation. Each chapter begins with the etymologies of a few words, some of which inform the novel’s thematic elements (spoiler alert: the largest of these entries is for the word “Love”). More broadly, it explores themes of language, self-awareness, perception, ego, and the narcissism with which we all contend. A favorite passage:

“What’s going on here? Cash asked with restrained impatience, believing all this was somehow about him […] But Bone had been thinking that he, Bone King, was the focal point of this tableau, and Limongello—the real one—had been thinking he was. Mary thought she was, too, and so, not doubt did Flash and the deputy. […] Yes, Jorge, too, like each of the rest of them was thinking, This is about me, this is another episode in the story that is about what happens to me.”

It’s fitting that this present moment—this one right here, right now, is about what happens to Man Martin.

MEMOIR

Judge: Guatam Narula 

Finalist: Stephen Corey, Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural 

Spanning three decades, Startled at the Big Sound is an essay collection that draws from the breadth of Stephen Corey’s life and career experiences. Whether it’s finding unintentional poetry in roughly translated Korean adoption papers, bonding with an erstwhile high school friend over breakups and the music of Roy Orbison, or bemoaning the literary herd mentality that made the word “limn” popular for a number of years, readers will find in Corey a discerning and moving voice.

Winner:  Christopher Martin, This Gladdening Light: An Ecology of Fatherhood and Faith 

Disillusioned by the “artificial light spread by industrial Christianity,” Christopher Martin is in search of a new theology. Through a spiritual pilgrimage consisting of treks amid the Appalachians, unsuccessful backyard gardening, and (above all else) the births of a son and daughter, Martin’s faith is renewed by “the God I met in my children…a God who could be human.” Steeped in the physical and political environs of the American south and spiritually inheriting from both Thoreau’s Walden and Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, This Gladdening Light is a poignant, lyrical, and heartfelt expression of the divinity within our planet and ourselves.

POETRY CHAPBOOK

Judge: Beth Gylys

Finalist:  Kathy Kincer, After the Transplant  

The harrowing and heart-breaking death of a child serves as the lynchpin of this book whose unflinching examination of loss is balanced with a keen eye for detail and an admirable, winning emotional restraint.

Winner:  Jane Simpson, On the Porch, Under the Eave

With lyrical beauty, formal clarity and a deft light touch, the poems of this chapbook explore childhood, family, forgiveness and the death of an aging parent in poems that are complicated, sonorous and nuanced.

POETRY FULL-LENGTH BOOK

Judge: Elizabeth Hughey 

Finalist: Danielle Hanson, Ambushing Water

This book is wonderfully wild! A man eats his wife’s ashes in his cereal every morning. An elderly woman’s breasts are like “pelican beaks full with fish.” Flies make nests of our dreams, and anything can be part-bird or part-bug. Shadows are important. So are puddles. They are possible worlds to be explored — “the water not as a mirror but a window” to be climbed through. Danielle Hanson’s poems reside in shadows and daydreams, but they are not whimsy. They are weighted by emotion. Inside an empty mailbox there is a longing, a loneliness, and Hanson allows that emptiness to evolve into “a small species of bird/with the call of late night radio.” I swear, I have heard that bird call before. I really love these poems.

Winner: Andrea Jurjević, Small Crimes

Andrea Jurjević can draw the beauty out of anything. In her poems set during the Croatian war in the 90’s, “Bombs start to rain like massive white chrysanthemums” and “smoke tusks coil from burning leaf piles.” There is a nostalgia, in Small Crimes, even for the darkest parts of life growing up in a war-torn country. Amid the litanies of savagery and slaughter, we see locals find their old routines, like the “men playing chess on the corroded hood of a Volkswagen, against the backdrop of the bludgeoned courthouse, the toothless library.” Nature, too, does its thing, reviving in green and “the gold-glow of lichen” from its decay. The most important force in Jurjević’s poems, though, is certainly love, which persists in all its forms — lust, longing, heartbreak  — in the poems that take us with them all the way from Croatia to America. This is such a gorgeous book.

ROMANCE

Judge: Susan Sands 

Finalist: Marilyn Baron, The Alibi

Smooth. That’s the best way to describe Marilyn Baron’s writing style in this romantic suspense. Her ease of storytelling instantly immersed me into the world of Merritt Saxe’s complex web of lies, intrigue, and romantic complications. Her boss’s insistence that Merritt remain his alibi, her boyfriend’s refusal to commit, and her constant desire for something beyond what her current life offers keeps Merritt forging ahead. Meeting a handsome stranger puts things into perspective and strengthens her resolve to fight for her future. The characters were engaging, and the dialogue realistic and entertaining. The story kept me guessing until the end. Marilyn is a gifted author!

Winner: Sally Kilpatrick, Bless Her Heart

A preacher’s wife walks into a strip bar…and the whole town finds out by sundown. Sally Kilpatrick does a wonderful job of giving readers what they came for—if what they came for is complete entertainment and a side-splitting tale of Southern angst. Posey Love is the perfect wife to Chad, the local upstart preacher. He believes she should be obedient. Obedience isn’t exactly Posey’s strong suit, but Lord, she tries. Until Chad gets busted with a favorite member of his flock. Posey has already had her heart blessed so many times she can’t count, being the town hippy’s daughter. But this throws her into a life spin that has the old biddies in town flapping their jaws beyond anything that’s happened in her past. Her coming to Jesus is one for the ages, but small towns are funny. They take care of their own, even if they whisper behind your back while doing so. Sally wrote a fantastic tale and her book shines bright.

SHORT STORY COLLECTION

Judge: Stephanie Storey

Finalist: D. B. Martin, Terror Tales Vol. 1

D.B. Martin is a master storyteller and these Terror Tales will make your heart race from start to finish. Each story rips along at a fast clip, and each comes to shocking, yet perfectly inevitable end. Beware: once you start this collection of short stories, you won’t be able to put it down.

Winner: Michael Bishop, Other Arms Reach Out To Me 

This is a beautiful collection of short stories. Deeply human, unexpectedly funny, and profoundly insightful about the truth of the human condition, reading this collection was like wrapping up in a beloved blanket. Some books tell a good story. Some are beautiful written. Some give you insight into what it means to be human. Some make you laugh and cry. This collection does it all. It will wrap you up and won’t let you go.

SPECIALTY BOOK

Judge: Jill Frank

Finalist: Jimmy Carter, The Craftmanship of Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter became well known for his support for Habitat for Humanity. This book describes his relationship to making furniture for the past 35 years, so- no matter one’s interest in the art of woodworking itself, or the day to day reminiscing of cabin lifestyle, the detailed depictions and explanations of Jimmy Carter’s craftsmanship are absorbing. The photographs in the book are used as a smart descriptive tool in charting Carter’s relationship to craft based decision-making.

By recounting his woodworking experimentations, he’s made a functional book about the accessibility of this creative practice.

Winner: Jason Thrasher, Athens Potluck 

The interviews in Athens Potluck’s are deliberate and careful documentation of a subculture that has been able to thrive within a music loving community. The photographs are the strongest part of the book project – they carry the interviews. They are smart, thoughtful descriptive environmental portraits that give all of the stories a proper context.

This book is the perfect outlet for the beginnings of an archive of the quiet creative scene in Athens. Thrasher’s hypersensitivity to the granularity of the musician’s experiences is a thread throughout all of the stories. I imagine that future iterations of this project would include wildly different music tastes and more of a range of lifestyles. Regardless, Thrasher made a lovely coffee table book that complicates and enhances my perception of Athens, makes me want to live there…

YOUNG ADULT
Judge, Marie Marquardt 

Finalist: McCall Hoyle, The Thing with Feathers

This beautifully written story addresses the experience of living as a teen with epilepsy, a theme not often explored in Young Adult fiction. When the novel begins, Emilie Day has been homeschooled, living alone with her mother on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Her mother determines that it’s time for Emily to start attending the local high school, but Emily feels certain that the plan will end in disaster. What follows is a warm and inspiring story of new friendships, first love, the bond between mothers and daughters, and one girl’s struggle to overcome her fears and live life fully.

Winner: Aaron Levy, Blood Don’t Lie 

At once heartbreaking and hilarious, Blood Don’t Lie weaves together a deeply personal account of bullying with broad reflections on what it means to be a Jewish teen in the contemporary world. Aaron Levy perfectly captures the voice of Larry Ratner, a thirteen-year-old boy who muses that he would start a Short Persons’ Club, if he weren’t worried he’d be the shortest person in it! Grappling with what it means to become an adult, Larry maneuvers through difficult, sometimes devastating, and always morally complicated circumstances at school and at home. The themes are heavy in this story, and Aaron Levy offers no easy solutions to the problems Larry faces. But Larry’s refreshing, honest, and funny voice keeps readers engaged — and rooting for him! — from beginning to end of this compelling novel.

2017 Judges’ Statements

BIOGRAPHY 

Judge: James Taylor

Finalist: Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady

Opinionated, brilliant, brash, granddaughter of a mulatto slave, untiring civil rights advocate, writer, attorney, and eventually, an Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray’s story remained largely unknown until now. Focusing on Murray’s unlikely and enduring friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Patricia Bell-Scott has written a masterful biography of a great friendship that illuminates, indeed, shines a powerful searchlight on a tireless American quest for social justice. Women’s rights, minority rights, civil rights: it’s all here. Oh yes, it is beautifully written, too.

Winner: Ted Geltner, Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews

Harry Crews was one of the great transgressive, wild man characters in American letters. Beyond, or, more accurately, inside this contradictory and racous persona was a writer of exceptional talent and accomplishment. Harry Crews once said, “I have found nothing in this life that can match the feeling of having written something I’m proud of.” Should the author of this book, Ted Geltner, take those words to heart, he must be feeling exceptionally good. Blood, Bone and Marrow brings to life the great Harry Crews in thoroughly researched, lucidly written prose. Bravo!

CHILDREN’S BOOK

Judge: Pat Garrett

Finalist: Susie Gardner, 1, 2, 3 TEAM!   

1, 2, 3 TEAM! is a story about a child who learns that in sports it takes a group effort, a team, go be successful. Zoey, a young basketball player who is very talented believes she is the only reason her team is going to the championship. A new coach subtly teaches her a lesson about team work. A simple, direct story, 1, 2, 3 TEAM! has characters young readers can relate to in everyday life. It holds attention while teaching a life lesson. Well written, it moves quickly from the problem to the satisfactory resolution. This delightful book will not only be enjoyable to read, it will be a great story to read aloud to help children understand that teamwork is important in everyday life, as well as in sports.

Winner: Marcia Hawley Barnes, Tobijah    

Tobijah is a delightful story emphasizing that even though many of us are different, we are not alone. The story holds the attention of young readers as Tobijah, a duck, tries to find a friend. He is different than the other ducks, who would play with him for awhile and then go their own ways. Meeting a compassionate cat who is deaf changes the outlook for Tobijah and his hunt for a friend. Wanting to help, the cat has a plan that changes Tobijah’s life. This story is well written with the young reader in mind. It teaches through the story that helping and encouraging others can be a rewarding experience. Children can relate to the characters, and the story moves along emerging in a satisfactory outcome. Taking young readers on journey, an exploration of life, it entertains and holds their attention. Tobijah has memorable characters, an engaging plot, and is fun to read.

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY

Judge: C. Hope Clark

Finalist: Carole Townsend, Blood in the Soil

Superb storytelling inserted into a true tale. Carole Townsend took reality and gifted it with remarkable prose, turning some pretty gruesome scenes into a fluid, gripping story. Joseph Franklin had me. Then Detective Cowart. The author shows talent, making me fall into each character, regardless how forthright or ruthless, to the point I could deeply relate to the killer or the cop. Then with the added hint of noir, Townsend flavored the storytelling even more, like a dash more garlic to an already rich stew, just to reward the appetite of the person who appreciates more.

Winner: Trudy Nan Boyce, Out of the Blues

Sarah Alt, “Salt,” worked for me from page one. God, I love that nickname for her. When she stepped into Homicide, I stepped into Homicide. Each and every character resonated in his and her own style, to the point when one was introduced, I was locked into them, adding them to the delicious mixture. The story cascaded like a mystery’s supposed to do, taking me to the point I forgot the words and instead became a player. Rich with Atlanta flavor, I fully expect Out of the Blues to find cable television one day, and I’ll be in my recliner waiting for the next weekly episode to begin. Well done.

ESSAY

Judge: Amber Lanier Nagle

Finalist: Raymond L. Atkins, South of the Etowah: The View from the Wrong Side of the River

I think I am related in some way to Raymond L. Atkins. Not really. But when I read his anthology, South of the Etowah, I found his essays to be strangely familiar—as if some of the stories had been ripped from the pages of my own autobiography.

I think the mark of a natural born storyteller is that every reader instantly relates to his or her stories and finds them somewhat recognizable and deeply human. Raymond Atkins made that connection with me on the very first page.

His writing style is boldly conversational—as if he is sitting at a kitchen table telling us all about his struggles with passwords, his love-hate relationship with technology, the time he and his wife encountered the drunk guy at the Waffle House, the day he dumped 260,000 fake Twinkies onto a North Alabama highway, or how his mama used to reach for the Paregoric to fix whatever ailed him.

Peppered throughout his wildly entertaining essays are morsels of wisdom to help us all get through life. Gems like:

• If you are ever scheduled to appear on the Jerry Springer Show and they ask you to step into a soundproof room for a little while, leave the premises immediately.

• Calling it “art,” doesn’t make it art.

• You may be right, but the eighteen-wheeler is bigger.

• Strange are the ways of city folk.

• And if you have to be in the hospital for a procedure, just go ahead and remove your clothing in the lobby at check-in and let everyone get a good look.

Atkins writes about ordinary, everyday experiences and memories—slice-of-life stuff that happens to all of us. But he writes with panache and infuses humor in the mundane. You’ll smile from beginning to end.

Winner: Kathy A. Bradley, Wondering Toward Center

Kathy A. Bradley’s Wondering Toward Center chronicles the author’s exquisite encounters with nature—a shimmering moon that floods her bedroom with light; the crepey remains of a snake’s skin; a feathery, fuschia mimosa blossom; golden grain heads waving in a field; a mystical fairy path; a brilliant sunscape. Each encounter triggers a memory or a sophisticated thought, vividly expressed through Bradley’s lyrical prose and masterful storytelling. At the conclusion of her essay collection is a revelation binding the pieces together—that time is not linear or circular, but that time is a spiral in which we find ourselves wandering. We circle back and relive experiences over and over again, but we relive them on different planes of understanding as we are drawn toward a center.

In a passage dated October 7, 2012, Bradley writes: “…the first word I ever spelled, the first thing I gave back to the world as a writer was my name, was myself. That is a dangerous precedent. And it makes it hard sometimes to tell the stories. Hard to find the right words, to arrange them in an order that tells the truth and, at the same time, shields the innocent, dispenses kindness, and extends forgiveness. What would be harder, though, is not to tell them at all.”

Her passage relays a universal truth among writers: that we write because we must. I, for one, am thankful Ms. Bradley feels compelled to write, and in doing so, produced the thought-provoking Wondering Toward Center. Through the pages and stories, I wandered—and wondered—alongside her, and at the end, I found myself transformed.

 
FIRST NOVEL

Judge: Ravi Howard

Finalist: Anne Corbitt, Rules for Lying

In Rules for Lying, Anne Corbitt creates compelling surface tensions between the secrets that are revealed and those that remain hidden.  Corbitt shapes lies and truths with sharpness, and she uses both as objects that her characters must choose to carry, hide, or reveal.  The teenagers in Rules for Lying learn the weight and consequences of their words and actions, and Corbitt’s adult characters show the fateful toll of long-ago decisions. The skillful use of the ensemble showed the complexities of difficult truths when seen through familial bonds, biases, and allegiances.  The novel is a dynamic journey through the many layers of aftermath and reckoning.

Winner: Gray Stewart, Haylow

The character ensemble in Gray Stewart’s Haylow shows a multitude of voices representing the many layers of Georgia and the American South, from the historical to the contemporary, urban to the rural, from the somber to the humorous.  With an eye for detail, Stewart shows a beloved antique with missing and broken parts.  He shows characters mapping dangerous terrain and treacherous waters.  These moments parallel the journey for professor Travis Hemperly, as he tries to piece together a family history, a career, and a life amid the stubbornness and changes of his surroundings. Stewart creates intersections and clashes along the old and new lines of race, gender, and the pastoral, and in doing so he affirms and challenges Southern literary tradition.

HISTORY

Judge: Lora Mirza

Finalist: Dan A. Aldridge, Jr., To Lasso the Clouds: The Beginning of Aviation in Georgia. 

Imagine warming up a flying-machine on Washington Street in Athens, Georgia, late at night over one hundred years ago. Two talented young men–Ben T. Epps, Sr. and Zumpt Huff—worked together to create first a biplane, and later monoplanes, in their spare time, using bicycle wheels, cheap fuel, and reusable parts. Significantly, author Dan. A. Aldridge, Jr. of Winterville, Georgia gets to the heart of the story–in determining the true contribution of these two men to early aviation in Georgia, along with introducing other aviators of the time. Photos show various Epps-Huff planes (Huff is easily distinguished by his black derby hat!) as these resourceful partners move toward this signal achievement by both of them—the first monoplane flight in the United States—on August 28, 1909.

Winner: Kaye Lanning Minchew, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia. 

This visually stunning, carefully researched pictorial history of a national figure who considered Georgia his second state gives authenticity to the rehabilitation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he recaptured his earlier optimism while rebuilding his physical strength and learning ways to draw attention away from his disability. He would continue to visit Georgia for the rest of his life. The archival quality of the book comes from interviews with Georgians from all walks of life and from photos, which help carry the story. Troup County native Kaye Lanning Minchew brings together many sources to give us a close-up picture of FDR in Georgia and of his ease with the people around him. As voluminous as the Roosevelt literature is, A President in Our Midst adds a needed new perspective.

INSPIRATIONAL-RELIGIOUS

Judge: Anne R. Richards

Finalist: J. Steve Miller, Faith That’s Not Blind: A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Arguments for the Existence of God

Steve Miller’s “Faith That’s Not Blind:  A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Arguments for the Existence of God” creatively addresses a gap in religious studies curricula by challenging the assumption that the “God question” has been established as either irrelevant or moot.  This accessible and interactive text, written to serve as a supplement to standard texts in introductory religious studies courses, offers the possibility of a variety of rational positions re the Divine and in doing so should facilitate meaningful discussion about a topic of importance to many students and teachers.

Winner: R. Kirby Godsey, The God Particle: God Talk in a “Big Bang” World

God-Talk in a ‘Big Bang’ World, R. Kirby Godsey achieves a remarkable synthesis.  Through illuminating the meanings of what many readers would consider the impenetrable language of contemporary physics, he shows that the essence of humanity and the Divine are accessible through this very language.  Some readers may be disappointed to learn that the “God particle” is neither.  But the awe-inspiring fact of singularity, of radical relationality, of separation’s impossibility is what concerns Godsey.  “The big bang,” he writes, “did not happen out there, outside of us.  Rather, we began inside the ‘big bang.’  Creation is still happening and every creation is an act of light and love.  Each of us embodies the primordial energy of God.”

INSPIRATIONAL-SECULAR

Judge: Nicole Kearney

Finalist: Barry Pencek: The Millennial’s Guide to Wealth: Learn About Saving, Investing, Spending and Living While Drinking Beer

My finalist choice is The Millennial’s Guide to Wealth by Barry Pencek. The book’s subtitle: Learn about Saving, Investing, Spending and Living While Drinking Beer immediately drew me in. While I’m not in the book’s target audience, the advice given is solid and spot on while being humorous as well. It’s a book full of tips for the Millennials on learning how to manage their finances for today, tomorrow and the future. It’s a book I want my children to read to give them a voice other than mine that echoes my sentiment and values about money (except they’re not old enough to drink beer). I applaud Barry Pencek for making an oftentimes hard to understand subject, easy to digest!

Winner: Jane K. Ashley, Cancer: The Light at the End of the Tunnel

My choice for winner is Cancer: The Light at the End of the Tunnel by Jane K. Ashley. This book provides inspiration and empathy for those in the throes of cancer. It’s humorous and compassionate. It’s a wonderful companion while on the journey from discovering you have cancer to fighting and surviving. It’s a book I’m giving to my friend who is still struggling with breast cancer. I believe this book speaks to all the things I want to say, but can’t find the words to express. Cancer: The Light at the End of the Tunnel, expresses exactly what I want her to hear, each step of her journey. Kudos on a marvelous book.

LITERARY FICTION

Judge: Andrew Plattner

Honorable Mention: Ann Hite, Sleeping Above Chaos

Sleeping Above Chaos by Ann Hite is a compelling story told with colorful language and considerable care. The plentiful dialogue contributes to vivid characterization, and keeps the story moving forward as well. When the characters aren’t speaking, their thoughts are become stories.

An excerpt:

“Joyce Clay was a crotchety woman who grumbled under her breath about sinners all the time. She wore a navy work dress and tied a pink scarf over her steel-gray hair. On her feet were clunky men’s shoes. The old truck they rode in seemed to barely hold together. Ella Ruth watched the sanatorium looming in front of them. Six huge columns and a wide front porch would have suggested a fine hotel to any visitors. Maybe that was the feeling they were looking to give patients who were forced to come stay here . . . A soul was much better off if he had money and could stay in a private cabin near the lake.”

The quality of the entries for this category was quite good overall. While the winning novel is a standout, both Sleeping Above Chaos by Ann Hite and The King Who Made Paper Flowers by Terry Kay are worthy of praise.

In each of these works, the narratives are confident and unique. Each book is a study in good story-telling. Kay is particularly good at pacing his narrative. Hite’s novel keys on dialogue; she’s adept at creating characters who can respond in surprising, yet necessary ways.

Finalist: Terry Kay, The King Who Made Paper Flowers

The King Who Made Paper Flowers by Terry Kay is a terrific novel. Frequently, the story-telling itself is the story; the pages turn with ease. Memorable passages are easy to find; here’s a section from early in the novel:

“I have been many people on bus trips, lived many lives. My list of aliases is worthy of a wanted poster tacked to a bulletin board in a post office. I have been a singer Nashville-bound to make a recording, a priest assigned to a prison ministry, a baseball player headed for a tryout, a psychic, a poet, a painter. I do not invent these histories simply to be deceiving. I tell them for the adventure of being someone I am not, or could never be.”

Winner: Julia Franks, Over the Plain Houses

The winning entry is Over the Plain Houses, by Julia Franks. This is a wonderful book. The story is set in the late 1930s; the narrative brings the characters and the mysterious world they inhabit to life. A reader can forget that this story is something from the past; the pages are alive with vivid, vital description and events unfold in very real and surprising ways. The quality of the writing is the novel’s strongest attribute; there are passages too many to count that reward a reader. But here’s one example:

“And right then, he’d faltered. Already. Not a day had passed, and the devil had succeeded in hardening his heart. Brodis hadn’t rested a moment since. Satan always came in the same sly guise, with lawyerly arguments and rabbit-trap questions, all of which began with the same word: How? How could such-and-such happen, and how did a certain feature make sense, and how come this other had happened? But he’d learned to recognize them for what they were: distraction, illusion, cowardice.”

Over the Plain Houses is worthy of our wonder and admiration.

MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Judge: Iraj Omidvar
Honorable Mention: Molly Brodak, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir

Bandit is the story of a life carefully examined, in large part and over many years of growing up, because the author’s father robbed banks.  Molly Brodak’s memoir looks into the many sides of the far-reaching effects, on a child, of a parent’s words and actions.  This is also a book that reveals how truly significant seemingly small events can be and how we create, hear, and tell stories about them as we make sense of our lives.

Finalist: Susan Lindsley, Possum Cops, Poachers and the Counterfeit Game Warden

For most readers, opening this book will be stepping into an unfamiliar world of wild game in vast forests; landowners, hunters, rangers, and poachers in a complex dance often involving guns; a niche tourism industry; and small rural communities. The many dramatic events of the not-too-distant past recounted in the book highlight some of the urgent environmental, political, and moral dilemmas behind current laws and regulations for conservation and natural resource management. This world comes to life for readers because of Susan Lindsley’s skillful storytelling in the many vignettes that make up this remarkable memoir.

Winner: John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and artist Nate Powell, March

This autobiographical graphic novel about the life of John Lewis, the iconic Civil Rights leader, succeeds not only in giving a gripping account of some of the most important events of the Civil Rights Movement but also in showing what it takes to bring a measure of justice into the world. By revealing how change is brought about, this memoir does not merely inspire; it empowers.

POETRY

Judge: Kevin Cantwell
Finalist: James Davis May, Unquiet Things

This impressive first book by James Davis May is one that slows us down to point to a world we might not otherwise see. There are favorites to remember here, like “Protestant Elegy” where a family of his, hers, and theirs elbows for attention at the breakfast table, or “My Lover’s Ex-Husband” in which the reek of the other represents the visceral sting of memory’s cloying press. In this young poet’s certainties of expression, we too go quiet “thinking about something else.” If prose is the language of the familiar, this poetry might be the language of the “familial,” that secret code of understanding made public when the poet says it out loud—that what we first know about the world is the strangeness of the family summoned into light, that we may recognize their distorted features, thumbed from clay, kiln-fired, lit by stars and the cracked doorways into which knowledge can be glimpsed.

Winner: Sandra Meek, An Ecology of Elsewhere

Several books into her still developing oeuvre, Sandra Meek has taken the poetics of travel to another register of the masterful. Hers is not the solipsism of Confessionalism’s umpteenth wave nor the one-off whatever of irony. What we have are the long sentences of poiesis, a luminous syntax fashioned from the distractions and turns of the inexpressible into—if we can be so high-minded—art. In Coleridge’s poem of the exile returned to society, the grip of the mariner stops the wedding guest cold, who in turn is transfixed by his “glittering eye.” In the lines of Sandra Meek we too are made to hear, in these harrowing echoes of speech, reports from that other country we call poetry.

ROMANCE

Judge: Erika Marks

Finalist: Marilyn Baron, Stumble Stones

Marilyn Baron’s Stumble Stones grabbed me from the start with its opening hook: We meet Hallelujah Weiss, a soap-opera writer, who is on her way to Italy to mend her broken heart—with her ex-husband’s credit card. But as soon as she—and the reader—meets the mysterious Alexander Stone, and his stash of diamonds, on the plane, Hallelujah’s dream of having a life as adventurous as her famous soap character, Polly, may soon be a reality. But what begins as a light-hearted encounter leads to far more, as Baron expertly shifts between modern day and World War II while she sends her hero and heroine on a fast-paced and suspenseful quest across Europe to solve the mystery of found diamonds, and lost loves. STUMBLE STONES, named so for the plaques laid in tribute to victims of the Holocaust, possesses the best qualities of historical romance. Baron knows her settings and her history, and her characters, those both contemporary and in the past, are well-drawn and convincing. Baron has a great talent for dialog, both in the banter of her modern lovers, as well as those engaged in much-more serious conversations in the novel’s past narrative. I never stopped rooting for Hallelujah and Alexander as they worked to peel back the layers of history to reunite—and mend—broken hearts, all the while pursuing their own happy ending. Well done, Marilyn Baron!

Winner: Susan Sands, Love, Alabama

Love, Alabama has everything I crave in a romance: A warm and inviting small town setting; a sexy hero and a smart heroine; and an ensemble of lovable and memorable family and friends to keep everyone company on their journey.

Sparks fly from start when former beauty queen Emma Laroux meets uptight Northerner Matthew Pope who is in town to direct her sister’s cooking show. But while Emma’s Water doesn’t immediately mix with Matthew’s Oil, there’s no question an attraction is simmering—the only question is can their complicated pasts be untangled in time for true love to prevail?

I adored Sands’ style. She has a fabulous sense of humor and it reveals itself effortlessly in her writing—especially in heroine Emma, whose self-deprecating wit only makes her more charming and relatable. Matthew has all the elements of a great romantic hero, haunted by past regrets but so good-hearted (and of course SO good-looking!) that we can’t wait for him to put aside his ghosts and make a future with Emma—even though he’s holding back a secret that could ruin their burgeoning love. To support and advise the lovers along their way to happiness, Sands has united a wonderful cast of characters, making the town of Ministry feel truly like home. Love, Alabama is full of heart and spirit and, best of all, delicious romance—and it is my pleasure to award it Best Romance Winner!

SPECIALTY BOOK

Judge: H. William Rice

Finalist: Judson Mitcham, Michael David Murphy, and Karen L. Paty, Inspired Georgia

In Inspired Georgia, Judson Mitcham, Michael David Murphy, and Karen L. Paty bring together poems and photographs that reflect Georgia’s history, its terrain, its ecology, and its culture. Featuring poetry and photography from some of Georgia’s best artists, Inspired Georgia is a dialogue of word and image that reminds us again and again of the complexity, the beauty, and the promise of the State of Georgia.

Winner: Sonny Seals and George S. Hart, Historic Rural Churches of Georgia          

Sonny Seals and George Hart’s Historic Rural Churches of Georgia is much more than a book of photographs of rural churches. It is an illustrated exploration of the history and architecture of the Christian church in small towns and rural outpost across Georgia. Beginning with a very thorough and well documented essay on the history of Christianity in Georgia and the rest of the South, the authors examine the architecture that various traditions in worship inspired in out of the way places, sometimes describing and illustrating construction methods and types of wood used—even the current condition of the structures in question. The authors also play careful attention to the way in which slavery and its long aftermath affected the way the interiors of these churches were constructed. Illustrated with stunning photographs and detailed descriptions, Seals and Hart’s Historic Rural Churches of Georgia is a major contribution to the religious, cultural, and architectural study of the history of Georgia.

YOUNG ADULT

Judge: Elaine Drennon Little

Finalist: None

Winner: Marsha Mathews, Growing Up With Pigtails

Marsha Mathews’s Growing Up With Pigtails is a short volume of contemporary poetry that gives musical resonance to the joy, harshness, and temporary insanity of adolescence.  These short coming-of-age gems are universal: The reader is transported to times of innocence, embarrassment, confusion, excitement, and gut-wrenching pain. (Being a lover of poetry is NOT a prerequisite.) These descriptions are REAL, living just under the surface of the inner self, for anyone who is facing angst of young adulthood—-and for anyone who already has.

2016 Judges’ Statements

CHILDREN’S BOOK

Judge: Pat Garrett

 Finalist: The Birthday Candle by Jamie Bobo

The Birthday Candle is a whimsical tale that will delight young readers. Children will enjoy reading this book with its colorful illustrations and its engaging story. As the kingdom celebrates the birthday of the Princess, a terrible thing happens just as the cake is brought out; the lights go out in the castle. This means an end to the celebration.  However, the Queen has a great idea that not only saves the day, but begins a birthday tradition that is still celebrated today. The idea of telling a story to explain how a tradition was started will plant seeds in the mind of the reader to explore how others began and perhaps make up some explanations of their own. Children will find this book to be a favorite.

 Winner: The Magician’s Hat by Malcolm Mitchell

The Magician’s Hat is an original story with characters that are real and can be identified with by the young reader.  The story is entertaining and enjoyable to read. It is written simply and directly with illustrations that add interest to the story. When the magician is challenged as to whether his magic is real or not, there is an element of suspense added to the story. The author puts the answer to the challenge in the character’s hands, making the positive solution real to the children.  The story ends with a question to entice the reader to consider his dreams for his own future. This book will be a favorite to read and to be read aloud.

DETECTIVE/MYSTERY

Judge: C. Hope Clark

 Finalist: Hoochy Koochy: A Jake Eliam ChickenBone Mystery  by Cliff Yeargin

With a taste of noir in the storytelling, Hoochy Koochy grabbed me from the beginning with voice and action. Dialogue runs this story, which is a special interest of mine when it comes to reading a new author. Clipped one-liners. Snappy retorts. Guys who accept their lots in life and roll with the punches. Loved the fact this protagonist had so many flaws yet I found myself loving him still. It’s terse, quick writing, my favorite type of prose. Minimalist with no wasted words. Yet the words used were spot on in keeping me engaged. Loved it. Really did.

 Winner: 3 Women Walk into a Bar by Linda Sands

The title drew me in. The cover rocked. But when I opened the book to read the first chapter, I felt comfortable enough to crack the spine and invest in this story. Love, love, love this author’s voice. The dry humor and descriptions sucked me right in. I’m not a love of multiple POVs, but I was four chapters into the book before I realized the author was doing it, because I was so enjoying the ride. Ms. Sands has such a savvy, clever wit about her that I was already wondering what else she’d published because I was on this author train. The voice is amazingly fresh and strong. Dialogue is my favorite part of a book, and as a close second, characterization, and in this case, 3 Women Walk into a Bar snared me from the very beginning. Nicely done.

FIRST NOVEL

Judge: Anne Corbitt

 Finalist: Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich

Generations of Burroughs men have led lives as secretive and hardened as the mountain they call home, where the stills run plenty, violence is the cost of doing business, and old sins are never forgotten. Panowich deftly intertwines the stories of those tied to the mountain’s history—from a young woman who abandons her abusive home with dreams of the stage to a local sheriff trying to make good on the family name. Readers may recognize the rough South lineage of William Gay or Larry Brown in this novel, but the story is undoubtedly Panowich’s own. With beautiful, haunting prose and a plot as twisted and surprising as a mountain road, it’s tempting to speed through these pages, but take your time here. You’ll be sorry when there are no more pages to turn.

 Winner: The Courtesan by Alexandra Curry

A blind fortune teller called “the Master of Wind and Water” speaks these words over the young Sai Jinhua: “She will be both one and many people. She will lead both one and many lives.” The fortune is realized not only for Jinhua, the novel’s vulnerable and flawed protagonist, but also for the book itself. Curry transports readers to a vivid, lyrical, painful, dazzling world with her detailed and thorough imagining of this legendary woman’s life, following her from a happy childhood in Suzhou, to a brothel and then a concubine’s courtyard, to an embassy in Vienna, to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, and finally to the home she has long pursued. In each place, Jinhua lives one of her “many lives” with curiosity and dignity, even amidst isolation, shame, and unthinkable violence. Through it all, Curry builds an enchanting world that any reader would be lucky to visit.

HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY 

Judge: James Taylor

 Finalist: The Triumph of the Ecunnau-Nuxulgee: Land Speculators, George M. Troup, States Rights, and the Removal of the Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama, 1825-38 by William W. Winn

Ecunnau-nuxulgee  is the Creek Indian expression for “those greedily grasping after lands.”  While the story of the Cherokee expulsion from Georgia is fairly well known, Mr. Winn focuses on the equally tragic story of the forced removal of the Creek Indian nation from Georgia and Alabama lands. Many of the issues involved, land, greed, slavery, and states rights, eerily portended the Civil War. Twelve years of research coupled with lively writing make for compelling reading.

 Winner: Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists by Leonard Ray Teel

Superbly researched and eminently readable, Reporting the Cuban Revolution is a timely exposition of how the best and sometimes worst intentions of thirteen American journalists reporting on the Cuban Revolution of 1957/58 were subverted by Fidel Castro. The book is a profound story of journalism gone awry; it is an important historical study of reporting Castro’s revolution as not what was, but what one wished to see.

INSPIRATIONAL-RELIGIOUS 

Judge: Anne Richards

 Finalist: Worship Matters:  A Collection of Essays on the Practical and Spiritual Discipline of Worship by Lisa M. Allen-McLaurin

Dr. Lisa M. Allen-McLaurin’s Worship Matters:  A Collection of Essays on the Practical and Spiritual Discipline of Worship explores the question of which worship practices are most likely to lead “to a transformative encounter with G-d.”  This eloquent collection concerns topics as diverse as the use of social media during service, to the asphyxiation of authentic Christian worship within her own community.   According to the author, such worship emerges from the “invisible institution” of Black African Christianity, an antidote to the form of White Christianity that has asserted slavery to be an institution approved by God, and Blacks to be inferior to Whites.  The author regrets that today the ethos of the Black Church is being submerged in “a very Western, capitalist, individualistic” approach to worship that highlights evangelism, individual conversion and salvation, and the gospel of prosperity.  In her own religious tradition, justice is an overarching concern; and the essays collected here explore the question of how to craft localized, holistic, and community-oriented services that can re-awaken a commitment to justice in all worshippers.  “We believe that the G-d who delivered slaves out of Egypt is the same G-d who delivered the slaves out of Georgia,” she writes, “[I]s the same G-d who broke through history in the person of Jesus Christ, and is the same G-d who breaks through history to deliver us.  We know that G-d is a G-d of justice and liberation.”  Although her focus is the Black/African/American Church, Allen-McLaurin’s insights will be relevant to church leaders, clergy or laity, from across the spectrum of practicing Christians who are interested in reinvigorating authentic worship and social action in their communities.  Concluding with an annotated bibliography of resources regarding African-American practices of communion and baptism, the book will also be of value to scholars of religious studies.

 Winner: Befriending Silence:  Discovering the Gifts of Cistercian Spirituality by Carl McColman

Befriending Silence:  Discovering the Gifts of Cistercian Spirituality sketches the facets of a nine-hundred-year-old European monastic tradition with surprising relevance to American culture in the twenty-first century.  On the outskirts of a fiercely competitive society that urges individuals to “use judgment to promote [themselves], to condemn others, and to create walls of separation,” the Cistercian community offers an alternative lifeway.  According to Cistercians, humankind has been offered a gift, or Charism, of potential union with the Divine.  The path to union involves conversion, stability, prayer, humility, compassion, contemplation, hospitality, and perseverance, all of which McColman explores in some depth.  Revealing “a lovely and richly contemplative way of life,” this path requires immersion not only in the Scriptures and the Liturgy of the Hours, but in the lives of the Cistercian saints and the Rule of St. Benedict.  A lay monk himself, McColman clearly has striven to make this book understandable to all readers.  And in the spirit of much of Thomas Merton’s work, Befriending Silence is “an important step toward making Cistercian spirituality available to all people who seek a deeper relationship with God.”

INSPIRATIONAL-SECULAR

Judge: Patricia Cardona

 Honorable Mention: Write Naked!  Secrets of Dynamic Prose Laid Bare! by Josh Langston

Write Naked! is as much a textbook as a humor book.  Josh Langston writes “My primary goal has always been to entertain.”  He achieves this goal throughout the pages of Write Naked with provocative images and wit.  His intention is to “share the stuff that works,” but his passion is making instruction fun.  Langston succeeds at both.  I defy anyone to read Write Naked and not laugh out loud.

 Finalist: Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change:  Inspire the People and Succeed Where Others Fail by H. James Dallas

Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change, is an essential read for anyone navigating the choppy and treacherous waters of surviving today’s tumultuous business environment.  The current economy demands that companies become more agile to survive the rapidly changing times.  H. James Dallas provides a clear approach to creating a culture that makes organizations more pliable and prepared to respond to these rapidly changing times.  He offers ways to identifying change makers and change resisters– Mavericks and Machiavellis.  With practical and tried techniques for crafting messages that motivate and overcome resistance, Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change offers powerful tools for successfully creating a culture poised for success.

 Winner: Secrets of a Zen Millionaire:  8 Steps to Personal Wealth with Real Estate by David Ryback, PH.D.

In Secrets of a Zen Millionaire, David Ryback takes the reader on a unique zen journey towards financial success in real estate by being compassionate and by doing the right thing.  Ryback’s approach to real estate does not focus on merely building a business, but rather building a family of friends by providing homes to others.  As a world traveler, his perspective is informed by several philosophies, cultures and religions.  One such cannon is summed up in Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  Secrets of a Zen Millionaire takes that message to heart by not only affirming the precept, but by also demonstrating how this promise is fulfilled when we act honorably and remember that “nothing matters as much as appreciating each moment for its uniqueness and meaning in our lives.” Secrets of a Zen Millionaire offers an inspirational approach to “Living more happily and getting rich by doing the right thing,”

LITERARY FICTION

Judge: Joe Samuel Starnes

 Finalist: Finding Tambri: A Novel in Stories by Sherry Meeks

Meeks’s stories told from various character first-person points of view are deftly woven together to reveal a compelling, overarching narrative about Tambri, a young woman struggling with the death of her four-year-old son and the end of her idyllic first marriage. Well-measured, vivid scenes built of poignant details bring the characters to life, allowing the reader to experience the deep internal emotion of this moving story firsthand.

 Winner: Driving the King by Ravi Howard

 This novel that plays with history achieves the rare feat of layering great depth and complexity into the story while being an extremely enjoyable read. Howard’s inventiveness of moving the on-stage attack by white supremacists on Nat “King” Cole in time and place (from Birmingham 1956 to Montgomery 1945) allows for explorations of the Civil Rights movement’s foundations. The novel is narrated by the fictional main character, Nat Weary, a soldier home from World War II who jumps onto the stage to protect Cole and ends up serving ten hard years in prison for beating the assailant. Upon his release, Cole hires him to be his limo driver in Los Angeles. Weary’s engaging, smooth voice rings as true and moving as any of the iconic singer’s melodies.

MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Judge: Iraj Omidvar

Honorable Mention: A Full Life, Reflections at Ninety by Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter’s A Full Life, Reflections at Ninety reviews a long life marked by challenges tackled with humility, persistence, and creativity often through consultations with thoughtful and thoughtfully selected friends and advisers.  From the lessons of the early challenges in life and career emerges a moral vision committed to honesty, human rights, peace, conflict resolution, and the health of people across the world.  The author’s unwavering pursuit of that moral vision creates the more formidable challenges of his life:  Running for governor of Georgia and the presidency, establishing the Carter Center, undertaking diplomatic missions, and taking public positions on controversial topics such as the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Besides fascinating anecdotes, often not covered in other works, the memoir contains assessments of the author’s decisions, noting missed opportunities, shortcomings in some of his decision-making processes, and even errors of judgment—assessments that stand out by virtue not only of their honesty but of the invaluable insights that can only come by way of a long, full life.

 Honorable Mention: Peace behind the Wire, A Nonviolent Resolution by Kit Cummings

Peace behind the Wire, A Nonviolent Resolution by Kit Cummings is receiving an honorable mention for its account of the author’s extraordinary work over many years to bring peace to inmates in some of the most violent prisons in the United States and abroad.  Cummings goes out of his way to reach out to people who have been put away by society and who live under extremely harsh conditions.  The inmates he works with are often considered violent and dangerous, but he approaches them as a fellow human, with understanding and compassion.  The memoir offers remarkable examples of conflicts resolved in the most unlikely of places among the most unlikely of participants.  With his work in prisons, Cummings brings hope for peace to the inmates.  With his memoir, he offers a powerful reminder that peace in our world is attainable, if sought with passion and perseverance.

 Finalist: All the Above: My Son’s Battle with Brain Cancer by Julia McDermott

Julia McDermott’s All the Above, My Son’s Battle with Brain Cancer is replete with powerful dialogues and descriptions that bring to life the circumstances leading to — as well as the significance of — each of the often life-and-death decisions involved in fighting brain cancer.  At the center of this drama is Jack, the courageous and much-loved young man whose struggle reminds us of the often invisible social ties that underpin our lives.  In recounting the events, McDermott exposes the powerful relationships among parents and children, siblings, and relatives and friends that sustain life and work, here in face of tremendous stressors. The memoir is also a poignantly appreciative look at the dedicated physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals the family relied on for Jack’s surgeries and recovery.

 Winner: Remain Free by Gautam Narula

In 2008, at the age of 15, Gautam Narula became acquainted with death-row inmate Troy Davis.  Remain Free is the moving account of Narula’s growing friendship with Davis until Davis’s execution in 2011, which took place in the context of worldwide calls for retrial and clemency by Amnesty International, Pope Benedict XVI, and a number of Nobel Peace Prize laureates.  Meticulously documenting interactions with Davis by sharing letters and detailed accounts of visits and interviews, the memoir creates a textured portrayal of Davis that goes way beyond his often sensationalist media coverage.  As we see the growing friendship between Narula and Davis, we come to appreciate the significance of the weighty issues Narula grapples with:  The morality of the death penalty, the flaws of the justice system and the flawed people who run it, and the inhuman cost of living in the social habitat of a “high-security prison.”

POETRY

Judge: Kevin Cantwell

Finalist: Sky Blue Enough To Drink, Beth Gylys

In her fifth collection of poems this Georgia State University professor demonstrates a particular affinity for phrasing that cuts the syntax of emotion into a harder remove than we might otherwise find in a less disciplined tonality of sentences. Certainly, there is emotion, certainly an undeniable affection at times for her subject, even a sadness, as in the poem “For My Father,” where the poet grants that “he had a daughter/who needed a father: the one/he was—the one he couldn’t be.” The more we read these poems, the more we settle into familiar intimacies we might know as our own. These are matter of fact poems written by an adult who knows the world of dying friends, of neighborhoods where a woman might not want to jog by herself, or of a friend’s boy, “his long hair pulled away from a face/both soft and strong.” This is a book of poems whose lives we recognize, lives that are yet shaped by a craft that is reserved and hardened by what art makes real.

 Winner: Tree Heresies by William Wright

In his title poem the poet speaks of “the hex of words guarding the central dark,” an apt configuration suggesting how we both summon and encounter language to bring its mystery into a kind of focus, while positioning knowledge in shadow to maintain its essential power over us. In William Wright, it is the past that is essentially powerful, yet it is the present that seems vexed by what feels like the past, as in “Prologue” where the poet addresses, it seems, himself, who has “taken a road into a place you do not know”—much like the speaker in the famous Robert Frost poem who strikes the rhythm of language so firmly that it makes the present journey of his opening sentences both frightening and seductive. Wright himself is seduced by words he obviously loves. His language is so rich in places that it might be the mulch of the past we hold to our faces. It is a pleasure to recognize in this poet who has done much for poetry in Georgia the power of language that does so much for poetry itself.

ROMANCE

Judge: Erika Marks

Finalist: His Best Friend’s Baby by Susan Carlisle

An army medic, and the pregnant widow of his best friend who arrives on his doorstep for help, make for a compelling and heartfelt romance in Susan Carlisle’s His Best Friend’s Baby. Drawn together by a common loss, Ryan and Phoebe feel a connection at the start. But when Phoebe asks Ryan to be her midwife, what begins as a partnership grows into something far deeper and Ryan feels his devotion become more than just duty. The emotional stakes are high, and Ms. Carlisle keeps them there expertly, allowing the reader crucial and tender insight to both conflicted hearts on the journey by building her heroine and hero’s growing affections in a believable and effortlessly-paced way. Ms. Carlisle’s appreciation and knowledge of the exotic setting—Melbourne, Australia—is rendered with fascinating detail to give this romance an added twist, and her Happily Ever After delivers—in more ways than one!

Winner: Girl Meets Class by Karin Gillespie

Author Karin Gillespie knows the perfect recipe for romantic fiction and Girl Meets Class serves up a delicious feast for her readers when our heroine, Toni Lee Wells, is tossed abruptly out of her life of luxury and forced to support herself for the first time. Full of pluck and spunk, and armed with enough sass and spirit to make me root for her success in life—and love—Toni Lee is one the most memorable leading ladies I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a while. Indeed, she has some growing up to do—and Ms. Gillespie does a flawless job of making her journey from self-absorbed to self-aware both believable and poignant, adding a cast of well-drawn and memorable supporting characters along the way. But it is in her romance with Carl, a fellow teacher, where Toni Lee—and Ms. Gillespie—shine brightest, infusing their spicy and tender relationship with just the right amount of roadblocks to keep the reader wondering will-they or won’t-they until the deliciously satisfying ending. Ms. Gillespie’s writing flows effortlessly and her turns of phrases are memorable and unique, as is her snappy, witty dialogue which showcases her infectious sense of humor.

SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY

Judge: Sergio C. Figueiredo

Finalist: The Healer’s Choice by Kathryn Hinds

The Healer’s Choice is the story of a leader cast into a battle that brings her into confrontation with her long-held beliefs. Through a drawn out battle with an invading army, led by Lord Corvalen, we see Kel Nira reveal long-suppressed anger that drives her re-think her values and worldviews. The battles between the two, Kel Nira and Lord Corvalen, draw them closer to each other than they pull them apart; their story is one of ‘star-crossed lovers’ where every day magics guide each through a journey of self-discovery.

Winner: The Girl in the Mirror by Constance McKee

The Girl in the Mirror by Constance McKee begins Jodi Kendall having an out-of-body experience the night before her husband suddenly dies. When the police officers who have come to notify her the next day, she has a similar experience, hovering near the ceiling of the living room and unable to accept the news. In the following months, we see that Jodi has been grappling with her husband’s passing by self-medicating; one evening, she inadvertently overdoses and has a near-death experience in which she has a romantic evening with her late husband. As a psychiatrist, Jodi acknowledges that this experience demands some action on her part and identifies Dr. Simon Bentley, a near-death expert, to help her work through the psychological significance of this event. The rest of the novel takes the reader through Jodi’s path toward discovering how to travel to Michael’s (after-death) world to be with him and discovering a part of herself in the process. A mix of the afterworld, love story, and coming-of-age, McKee’s novel speaks to a part of the ongoing human struggle with personal loss and (re-)discovery—and the psychological growth that comes with those experiences.

SHORT STORY

Judge: Raymond L. Atkins

 Finalist: Women Longing to Fly by Sara Kay Rupnik

In Women Longing to Fly, Sara Kay Rupnik explores the lives of remarkable women going about the business of living. The stories are funny and sad, the characters are eccentric and believable, and the language is clever and poetic. These are women we wish we knew, flawed yet heroic individuals filled with full measures of courage, love, devotion, faith, loyalty, and goodness. Sara Kay Rupnik is a remarkable writer, and Women Longing to Fly is nothing less than a gem.

 Winner: A Clear View of the Southern Sky by Mary Hood

Mary Hood’s A Clear View of the Southern Sky is a finely-crafted collection of short fiction. Her rich language and lovely turns of phrase invite us to linger on page after page.  Her characters are carefully drawn inhabitants of the Southern landscape who remind us of someone we know, or perhaps that we wish we could someday meet. Her settings are unique, yet at the same time reminiscent of places we have been or that we yearn to visit. Her storytelling is easygoing and profound, unsettling and satisfying. Her voice is elegant, honest, and clear. Mary Hood is an exceptional writer, and A Clear View of the Southern Sky is, quite simply, one of the best books I have read in a long time.

SPECIALTY BOOK

Judge: Dr. H. William Rice

 Finalist: Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color:  The Past, Present, and Future of One Historically Black College by Andrew Feiler

The demise of Morris Brown College, once the largest of the Atlanta University Center institutions, began in 2002 and continues in 2016. In 2003 when the College lost its SACS accreditation due to financial mismanagement and debt of around 23 million dollars, the enrollment was close to 2,500.  Since then the College has gone bankrupt and has lived on volunteer faculty and community donations.  Still, it is alive, though the enrollment is less than one hundred students and its future is far from certain.  Andrew Feiler’s imaginative collection of photographs tells the story of the school’s proud history, its ragged and tattered present, and its uncertain future.  Feiler forces us to look at peeling paint, empty rooms with trash on the floor, shattered walls, and rotting handrails.  But among these photographs, he also insists that we remember the people who learned and grew here: a photograph of a collection of keys students used to get in dorm rooms, a picture of a trumpet someone once played, a photograph of empty mailboxes that once brought letters from home.   Part elegy, part history, and part question, Andrew Feiler’s Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color:  The Past, Present, and Future of One Historically Black College provides us with a moving, unforgettable visual journey.

Winner: Memories of the Mansion:  The Story of Georgia’s Governor’s Mansion by Sandra D. Deal, Jennifer W. Dickey, and Catherine M. Lewis

Sandra Deal, Jennifer Dickey, and Catherine Lewis’s Memories of the Mansion is a carefully documented and beautifully illustrated history of Georgia’s Governor’s Mansion from conception to architectural design to construction, and even to renovation after the 1975 tornado.  The authors contextualize the house in the lives of the families who lived behind its beautiful walls, focusing not only on the governor and the first lady, but also on children, celebrity guests, dogs–even Mac the goose from the 1960s.  Finally, the authors examine and illustrate formal celebrations at the Mansion by providing pictures of plates and invitations to inaugural events, state dinners, weddings, and open houses.   No collection of books about the history of the State of Georgia will be complete without this book..

YOUNG ADULT

Judge: Elaine Drennon

Finalist: Halley’s Hope by C.M. Fleming

As a finalist, I chose Halley’s Hope by C.M. Fleming. I came to this decision due to the structure of the novel, its ability to grip the reader during both adventurous and heartfelt sections, and most of all because of this short book’s easiness with a complex time in history. Fleming’s descriptive language and command of dialogue make history come alive–a part of history that might never have been seen as particularly exciting to young readers. The story takes place during the Civil War, yet Halley’s questions about life, emotions, and relationships could easily belong to a boy (or girl!) in the 21st century! I can imagine this book being used as supplementary reading material in a middle school history class, giving the names of real battles and formerly stuffy-sounding generals a refreshing rediscovery. Hats off to this author for this treat for young readers!

 Winner: Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley

Though I enjoyed reading all the selected books, this year’s winner was the easiest to decide.  This book is not “local good” or “first novel good,” this one is what I consider Charlotte’s Web/Alice In Wonderland good. Though I am not a fan of time travel, I gladly left reality and wanted to stay there. I’ve never been a great lover of the circus, but reading this story made me long to live under the big top.  The idea of “magic” through Doug Henning or Penn & Teller has never intrigued me more than a few minutes, yet this amazing book kept me enthralled in a magical journey like none other. Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley blends the concepts of friendship, pain and loss, and the trials and tribulations of growing up with a magical story I could easily believe. With every page of this book, I wanted to BE young Micah: I wanted to live in his house, mock his ill-tempered great aunt, spend a night in a tree house with his new best friend, and most of all to hold tightly to the beloved grandfather Micah knows will not be around much longer.  Circus Mirandus is a coming of age novel I’ll want to read to grandchildren, but will also read again just for myself.  This beautiful story is for readers of ALL ages—especially those of us in need of our own personal dose of magic.