Connecticut Center for the Book is pleased to announce finalists for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards.
The awards recognize and honor authors and illustrators who have created the best books in or about our state in the past year.
Between three and five finalists have been selected in each of five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Books for Young Readers (broken into three subcategories: Picture Books, Fiction, and Nonfiction). Five judges per category read each entry and reviewed works using rigorous criteria. The finalists are listed below.
FINALISTS for 2019 (in alphabetical order by author’s last name)
* Indicates a Spirit of Connecticut Nominee as well.
FINALISTS for 2020 (in alphabetical order by author’s last name)
Nonfiction
Motherland – Elissa Altman, Ballantine Books
Citizen Outlaw – Charles Barber, Ecco/HarperCollins
Sol LeWitt, A Life of Ideas – Lary Bloom, Wesleyan University Press
Ahab’s Rolling Sea, A Natural History of Moby-Dick – Richard J. King, The University of Chicago Press
Yale Needs Women, How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant – Anne Gardiner Perkins, Sourcebooks
Poetry
Without My Asking – Robert Cording, CavenKerry Press
Exuberance – Dolores Hayden, Red Hen Press
Peripheral Vision – Susan Kinsolving, Red Hen Press
mouthbrooders – Amy Nawrocki, Homebound Publications
Afterswarm – Margot Schilpp, Carnegie Mellon University Press
The Fire in Hand – Karen Torop, Antrim House
Fiction
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna – Juliet Grames, Ecco/HarperCollins
How Fires End – Marco Rafalà , Little A
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong, Penguin Press
Young Readers
Fiction
The Tornado – Jake Burt, Macmillan, Feiwel and Friends
New Kid – Jerry Craft, HarperCollins Children’s Books
Ruby in the Sky – Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo, Farrar. Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
Searching for Lottie – Susan L. Ross, Holiday House
Nonfiction
Superlative Birds – Leslie Bulion, Peachtree Publishers, Inc.
What You Eat – Valorie Fisher, Scholastic
I See Sea Food, Sea Creatures that Look Like Food – Jenna Grodzicki, Lerner Publishing Group
Titan and the Wild Boars – Susan Hood, HarperCollins
Picture Books
Winter Cats – Janet Lawler, Author, Albert Whitman & Company
Esther’s Gragger: A Toyshop Tale of Purim – Martha Seif Simpson, Author, Wisdom Tales Press
The Night Is Yours – Abdul-Razak Zachariah, Dial Books for Young Readers
2020 Spirit of Connecticut Finalists
Nonfiction
Forever Seeing New Beauties, The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams – Eve M. Kahn, Wesleyan University Press
Fiction
Old Newgate Road – Keith Scribner, Alfred A. Knopf
Young Readers
Venture Smith’s Colonial Connecticut – Elizabeth Normen, CT Explored
Poetry
The Breach – David Leff, Homebound Publications
The 2020 Connecticut Book Awards, a program of the Connecticut Center for the Book, an affiliate program of the Library of Congress and a core program of Connecticut Humanities, will be held virtually at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 15, 2020.