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.
2019 Winners:
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.
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Dangerous Subjects by Kenneth R. Coleman
Dangerous Subjects describes the life and times of James D. Saules, a black sailor who was shipwrecked off the coast of Oregon and settled there in 1841. Saules inspired and later had to contend with a web of black exclusion laws designed to deny black people citizenship, mobility, and land.
In Dangerous Subjects, Kenneth Coleman sheds light on a neglected chapter in Oregon’s history.
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The Gospel of Trees by Apricot Irving
Poignant and explosive, Irving weaves a portrait of a missionary family that is unflinchingly honest: her father's unswerving commitment to his mission, her mother's misgivings about his loyalty, the brutal history of colonization. Drawing from research, interviews, and journals — her parents' as well as her own — this memoir in many voices evokes a fractured family finding their way to kindness through honesty.
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Small Gods by Matthew Minicucci
“These poems and prose poems draw from sources as heterogeneous as the Pauline letters, the natural sciences, mathematics and astronomy in order to explore, inhabit, celebrate and mourn the mutability of love, the vulnerabilities of attachment and the unlikely, random and evanescent nature of existence itself. The depth and variety of metaphor mirrors the depth and variety of this poet’s remarkable curiosity and openness to the world, in all its glory and horror. The poems stick to memory like burrs to a pant leg.” — Alan Shapiro
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The Turning by Emily Whitman
Aran has never truly fit in with his selkie clan. He was born in his human form, without a pelt to transform him into a sleek, strong seal. Each day he waits, left behind while his selkie family explores the deep ocean.
When his mother undertakes a journey to the far north to seek help, Aran is left in the care of a reclusive human woman on remote Spindle Island. Life on land is full of more wonders — and more dangers — than Aran could have ever imagined. Soon Aran will be forced to decide: will he fight for his place on land, or return to his home in the sea?
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The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw
Hocus Pocus and Practical Magic meets the Salem Witch trials in this haunting story about three sisters on a quest for revenge — and how love may be the only thing powerful enough to stop them.
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Ladder to the Light by Beth Wood
In the follow-up to her debut poetry collection Kazoo Symphonies, Beth Wood explores deeper and more complex emotional territory. Inspired by an image from a Jane Hirshfield poem "Mule Heart" in which grief and joy are carried in “two waiting baskets,” Wood seeks to find balance again and regain footing after heartbreaking loss. Ladder to the Light chronicles her journey from grief to gratitude to believing in love again — poetry as a ladder that lifts us back up to the light.
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