Oregon Book Award
The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually by Literary Arts, Inc. for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in the genres of Fiction, Poetry, Literary Nonfiction, Drama, and Young Readers' Literature. Listed here are the winners in both Fiction and Nonfiction categories.
2020 Winners:
No God Like the Mother by Kesha Ajọsẹ Fisher
Kesha Ajọsẹ Fisher's No God Like the Mother follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope. Set around the world — the bustling streets of Lagos, the arid gardens beside the Red Sea, an apartment in Paris, the rain-washed suburbs of the Pacific Northwest — this collection of nine stories is a masterful exploration of life's uncertainty that will draw readers in and keep them riveted.
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Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado
The stunning, intimate essays in Anxious Attachments take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver. Though written from a single woman's perspective, these essays invite us to reflect on the many roles women play and the social factors that touch upon them. Alvarado's stories portray a broad world of experience, reflecting on class, race, and poverty in America with emotional depth and sensitivity.
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Spectra by Ashley Toliver
Precise, taut, minimalist poems are Toliver's Yellow Wallpaper, using the thud and drone of language to evoke the suffocation of a marriage gone sour, sound bouncing back, and creating patterns that are an inhibiting force in themselves. There's a pulse to her work, one that harnesses the energy on the page to transcend binaries and boundaries of the self.
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Lowriders: Blast From the Past by Cathy Camper
When new friends Lupe, Flapjack, and Elirio are each bullied by Las Matamoscas, they know they're going to like one another. When they find out they all love lowrider cars, they know they'll be friends for life. But the bullies won't leave the Lowriders alone — and they don't let any girls or babies into car clubs. Can these three determined outcasts prove they deserve to be in the car show? Humor, Spanish words, and lowrider culture come together in this heartwarming graphic novel of three friends navigating the bumpy terrain of friendship, bullying, and standing up for what you believe in. ¡Vámonos!
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How I Became a Spy: A Mystery of WWII London by Deborah Hopkinson
Bertie Bradshaw never set out to become a spy. He never imagined traipsing around war-torn London, solving ciphers, practicing surveillance, and searching for a traitor to the Allied forces. He certainly never expected that a strong-willed American girl named Eleanor would play Watson to his Holmes (or Holmes to his Watson, depending on who you ask).
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Graphic Literature
Penny Nichols by MK Reed and Greg Means
Stuck working mind-numbing temp jobs, Penny Nichols yearns to break free from the rut she's found herself in. When, by chance, she falls in with a group of misfits making a no-budget horror movie called Blood Wedding, everything goes sideways. Soon her days are overrun with gory props, failed Shakespearean actors, a horny cameraman, and a disappearing director. Somehow Penny must hold it all together and keep the production from coming apart at the seams. This hilarious original graphic novel is a loving tribute to the chaos and camaraderie of DIY filmmaking, and the ways we find our future — and our family — in the unlikeliest of places.
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