By Collection Management Librarian Kathy
We love book award season! Here are some recent winners for all ages—that also all happen to be written by women. A great way to celebrate Women’s History Month!
2022 award-winning titles by women
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell
Why you should try it: One of the winners of the Alex Award, which honors books written for adults that can be read and enjoyed by teens, this book is perfect for folks who love world-building and romance.
Description: Prince Kiem, a famously disappointing minor royal and the Emperor's least favorite grandchild, has been commanded to fulfill an obligation of marriage to the representative of the Empire's newest and most rebellious vassal planet. His future husband, Count Jainan, is a widower and murder suspect. Neither wants to be wed, but with a conspiracy unfolding around them and the fate of the empire at stake they will have to navigate the thorns and barbs of court intrigue, the machinations of war, and the long shadows of Jainan's past, and they'll have to do it together.
Audience: Adults & teens
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The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by Bonnie Ruberg
Why you should try it: Read this Stonewall Book Award winning book for insight on the growing LGBTQ+ movement in video games and game making.
Description: Bonnie Ruberg presents 20 interviews with 22 queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games.
Audience: Adults
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The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
Why you should try it: Who wouldn't want to read this gripping, thrilling story with a heroic main character? It just happened to win the Pura Belpre Children's Author Award and the Newbery Medal.
Description: There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra's world is ending. A comet has destroyed Earth, and only a few hundred scientists and their children—among them Petra and her family—have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet—and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth.
Audience: Kids
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Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba
Why you should try it: Discover one of Japan's most famous authors, with a career spanning four decades, in this Mildred L. Batchelder winner for an outstanding children's book originally published in a language other than English.
Description: Kazu knows something odd is going on when he sees a girl in a white kimono sneak out of his house in the middle of the night—was he dreaming? Did he see a ghost? Things get even stranger when he shows up to school the next day to see the very same figure sitting in his classroom. No one else thinks it's weird, and, even though Kazu doesn't remember ever seeing her before, they all seem convinced that the ghost-girl Akari has been their friend for years!
Audience: Kids
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Curb by Divya Victor
Why you should try it: Curb won the Pen Open Book Award for an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color—which is appropriate for a book that spans styles from poetry to prose to memoir to journalism.
Description: Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.
Audience: Adults
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Me (Moth) by Amber McBride
Why you should try it: Best to learn Amber McBride's name as she received the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award.
Description: Moth, who lost her family in an accident, and Sani, who is battling ongoing depression, take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors, which helps them move forward in surprising, powerful, and unforgettable ways.
Audience: Teens
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Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
Why you should try it: Listening to a memoir read by the author can be one of the more intimate and engaging reading experiences. Try this one which won the Audie Award for best autobiography/memoir.
Description: Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.
Audience: Adults
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About Kathy
Kathy is a Collection Management Librarian who loves reading, sharing, and talking about books. Her missions in life are to: create communities of readers, convince folks that her official title should be "Book Pusher," and refute that "disco" is a dirty word.
