2022 Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
by Allison Cobb
In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives — from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama — the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.
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 the Creative Nonfiction category; the winners of the General Nonfiction award can be found here.