North Street Book Prize 2023
Honoring the best self-published and hybrid-published books of poetry, children's picture books, middle grade books, art books, graphic novels & memoirs, genre fiction, mainstream/literary fiction, and creative nonfiction & memoir
First Prize $1,000 Art Book
Michael Bracey and Ruth Goring, Caras Lindas de Colombia/Beautiful Faces of Colombia
Honorable Mention $300
- Russel Ray, Nature’s Geometry: Succulents, Art Book
- Phyllis Schwartz, When Mom Feels Great, Then We Do Too!, Childrens Picture Book
- Sally Hinkley, Elephant and Bird, Middle Grade
- Ned Gannon, Peregrination, Graphic Novel and Memoir
- Lee Call, The Angel Room, Genre Fiction
- J.H. Mann, Hidden Depths, Genre Fiction
- Anne Calcagno, Love Like a Dog, Literary Fiction
- Lin Haire-Sargeant, Who Is Jo March?, Literary Fiction
- Sarah Birnbach, A Daughter’s Kaddish, Creative Nonfiction
- Rick Lupert, The Low Country Shvitz, Poetry
Thanks to all our entrants in the ninth annual North Street Book Prize for self-published and hybrid-published books. Our categories this year were poetry, genre fiction, mainstream/literary fiction, creative nonfiction/memoir, children's picture book, graphic novel/memoir, art book, and middle grade (books for tweens). We received 1,862 entries.
The North Street team this year included Sarah Halper, a scholar of English history and literature, who screened the books initially submitted as hard copies; Annie Mydla, our assistant editor and social media manager, who screened the online entries; Briana Grogan, our sensitivity reader; and final judges Ellen LaFleche and Jendi Reiter. Briana is also an assistant judge for our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Ellen and Jendi divided up a shortlist of approximately 65 books. Ellen took the lead on the poetry books and consulted on the children's books, graphic novels, and art books, while Jendi read the books in the other genres.
With eligibility expanding to include hybrid-published books and a new category for middle grade books, this may have been our strongest year yet. Jendi read nearly all the shortlisted books in their batch to the end, a new record. Fiction was particularly strong, leading us to award extra Honorable Mentions in both Genre Fiction and Mainstream/Literary Fiction. We've been waiting a long time for such a good selection of mystery novels. At the shortlist stage, the quality difference between finalists, Honorable Mentions, and First Prize category winners was subtle and somewhat a matter of taste, so if your book made it this far, you should be very proud!
First round co-judges Annie and Sarah said, "We wish to extend congratulations and thanks to all the authors who sent their self-published and hybrid-published books for us to read in 2023. We are greatly impressed by the level of creativity, care, and effort that we've seen in each and every entry. Please keep writing and sharing your work with all of us."
In poetry, we would have liked to see tighter editing of collections, and more attention to the forward movement and thematic arc of the book. We appreciate sophisticated craft, but emotionally meaningful stories and a voice with personality are what keep us reading to the last page. Formal poetry fares better when it employs a contemporary vocabulary of images. Traditional forms needn't commit you to aesthetic or political conservatism.
Bonds between people and animals were a common theme this year, especially in middle grade novels. We enjoyed getting to know your fictional dogs, horses, elephants, and even a sasquatch! It's great to take a deep dive into the natural world with an author who knows their stuff.
In memoir, we looked for perspectives we hadn't seen before, an opportunity to learn about a significant social issue or area of expertise, and memorable scenes written in a literary style. We're still on the lookout for a great essay collection where the individual essays are all equally strong and thematically connected without being duplicative. As with poetry, don't pad your book with slighter pieces. They need something to hold them together besides shared authorship.
Small print continued to be an issue in the graphic novels and art books. We don't understand the trend of omitting page numbers in these genres and in children's picture books. Prose books often had overly dense back cover copy in fonts and colors that were hard to read.
In addition to investing more in proofreading and copyediting for those pesky typos, authors of illustrated books should have someone double-check the impression made by the artwork. In a comic or picture book, are the characters easy to tell apart from one another? Is there an image that's hard to parse, or looks like something that it really shouldn't? Reading our own work, we see what we intended or expected to see, whereas an outside observer will catch those unhappy accidents before the judges see them.
Our Winners
Grand Prize winner Daniel Victor's The Evil Inclination is a sensitive, tragic love story between a modern-day Romeo and Juliet who transgress religious boundaries. As students at Brooklyn College in 2002, Lev Livitski, a dutiful son from a devout Orthodox Jewish family in Flatbush, and Angela Pizzato, a brash and alluring Italian Catholic from Bensonhurst, are struck with an unlikely and overwhelming passion for each other. Fearing that both families would be horrified, the lovers carry on an affair whose secrecy intensifies their lust but strains their relationship. Complicating matters, as Angela is falling in love with Jewish observance, Lev is souring on it.
Art Book winner Caras Lindas de Colombia/Beautiful Faces of Colombia, with text by Ruth Goring and images by Michael Bracey, is a bilingual book of photojournalism celebrating Colombia's African-descendant communities. The team behind the book traveled through Colombia in 2014 to document groups of local activists fighting racial discrimination, gender-based violence, and domestic abuse in Afro-Colombian society.
Honorable Mention Russel Ray's Nature's Geometry: Succulents is an enthusiastic and visually engaging introduction to the mathematical patterns that recur across hundreds of varieties of cacti, agave, euphorbia, cycads, sedum, and related plants.
Children's Picture Book winner Aunty Jane Knits Up a Storm by Steve Wolfson is a dynamic and effective tale about how a community supports one of its beloved elders through bereavement. Aunty Jane, a middle-aged Black woman with a vibrant bohemian sense of style, channels her grief over widowhood into knitting so furiously that she creates a literal thunderstorm. Friends of all ages help bring her energy back into balance in this handsomely illustrated story.
Honorable Mention Phyllis Schwartz's When Mom Feels Great, Then We Do Too!, illustrated with colorful, soft-edged drawings by Siski Kalla, teaches young children to be household helpers while their mom recovers from cancer.
Middle Grade winner Karen Glinski's Badge of Honor is a lively and well-researched adventure story in which a tween boy and his plucky dachshund rescue Navajo cultural treasures from a gang of thieves. While spending the summer at his grandfather's sheep camp in New Mexico, 11-year-old Emerson thwarts a scheme to steal war medals from the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, the World War II heroes who created an unbreakable code for the Allies based on their indigenous languages.
Honorable Mention Sally Hinkley's Elephant and Bird is a charming tale of friendship across generations and species. An escaped circus elephant provides emotional healing for an orphaned girl and the lonely old man who lives in her grandmother's boardinghouse.
Graphic Novel winner Dmitri Jackson is our first two-time category winner with the second installment of his comic strip about the staff of an urban record store, Blackwax Boulevard Is Listening. The protagonists contend with unrequited love, addiction, and fallen idols, as their tensions are brought to a head in a compelling storyline inspired by the #MeToo movement. Witty lines and sight gags leaven the serious topic. We love the dynamic composition and pervasive empathy in Jackson's work.
Honorable Mention Ned Gannon's visually stunning graphic novel Peregrination weaves together two stories of spiritually sensitive young men who wonder where they fit in the world. One is a wandering monk in a medieval fantasy realm, and the other is the modern-day schoolboy who draws the monk's adventures as a way to process his alienation from peers and teachers.
Genre Fiction winner Irene Cooper's psychological thriller Found features a grieving mother with a preternatural ability to find the bodies of missing children. With beautiful writing and distinctive characters, Found is both a literary study of bereavement and a twisty, atmospheric police procedural that touches on contemporary issues like anti-abortion fanaticism and the gentrification of cannabis.
Honorable Mention J.H. Mann's Hidden Depths is a crime thriller set on the Cornwall coast, in which our anti-heroine, an unappreciated middle manager at a telecom company, comes up with a risky scheme to cover her tracks in an embezzlement scandal. We awarded an additional Honorable Mention to Lee Call's The Angel Room, an insightful young adult novel about how Christian purity culture stymies healing from sexual trauma.
Literary Fiction winner Lucy May Lennox's immersive historical novel Flowers by Night explores cultural mores around class and gender in early 19th-century Japan through the same-sex love story of a low-ranking samurai and a blind masseur. Flowers by Night beautifully re-creates a setting that differs from ours in surprising ways, yet is home to universal longings for authentic intimacy.
Honorable Mention Anne Calcagno's gripping and well-researched novel Love Like a Dog takes us inside the world of pit bull rescue, through the coming-of-age story of a boy trying to save his dog from illegal fights. We awarded an extra Honorable Mention to Lin Haire-Sargeant for Who Is Jo March?, a Civil War espionage melodrama that foregrounds the queer subtext of Jo and Laurie from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
Memoir winner Mark S. Robinson's Black on Madison Avenue recounts highlights and anti-discrimination battles from the 40-year career of a trailblazing Black advertising executive. More than just an engaging personal story, Robinson has written the history of his professional community, with appreciation for people who made a path for him through a hostile environment.
Honorable Mention Sarah Birnbach's uplifting memoir, A Daughter's Kaddish: My Year of Grief, Devotion, and Healing, chronicles how she kept her vow to say prayers for her father's soul twice daily for eleven months, in accordance with Jewish law. Birnbach had to wrestle with her faith and her feminist commitments when the synagogues she visited didn't count women as legitimate members of a minyan (quorum) to say the prayers for the dead.
Poetry winner Geof Hewitt's meditative poetry collection Only What's Imagined is rooted in the rugged landscape and working-class culture of Vermont. We admired the book's modest yet self-assured voice and its respect for rural blue-collar life.
Honorable Mention Rick Lupert's The Low Country Shvitz is a whimsical travelogue through Georgia, Savannah, and North Carolina. The irreverent, diary-like poems have a breezy style and immediacy.
Read our press release about our winners. Our tenth North Street Book Prize competition is open from February 15 through July 1, 2024.
We would like to recognize and encourage these finalists in our ninth contest:
Art Book
Gary Berger, Einstein
Barbara Ford and Roberta Smith, In Pursuit of Happenstance
Children's Picture Book
Tiana Addai-Mensah, A Book Is Like a Baby
Judeah Reynolds, as told to Sheletta Brundidge and Lily Coyle, A Walk to the Store
David Ross, And Sometimes Y
Sharon Sorokin, Ziggy's Potato
Middle Grade
Wendi Threlkeld, Mercy's Rise
D.F. Whibley, One Arctic Night
Graphic Novel & Memoir
Thomas C. Jackson & Fritz McDonald, 2184 1/2
Nick Tomb, The Adventures of Maritime Domain Awareness Man
Genre Fiction
Beth Hamer Miles, 'Bout to Dye in Birmingham
Brooke Skipstone, The Queering
Mainstream/Literary Fiction
Bethany Browning, Sasquatch, Baby!
Ibrahim A. Kamara, The African Mosquito War
Creative Nonfiction & Memoir
Barbara Johnson, A Head of Cabbage
Nishta J. Mehra, The Pomegranate King
Carol Menaker, The Worst Thing We've Ever Done: One Juror's Reckoning with Racial Injustice
Poetry
Stuart Jay Silverman, Portals
Contest Judges
Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter is vice president of Winning Writers, editor of The Best Free Literary Contests, and oversees the Winning Writers literary contests. Jendi is the author of the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the poetry collections Made Man (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2022), Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), and the award-winning poetry chapbooks Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry, the 2016 New Letters Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction, the 2015 Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen Editor's Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa Review Awards for Fiction. Jendi's work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, Passages North, Cutthroat, Best American Poetry 1990, and many other publications. See their interviews in RoundPier and Lammergeier.
Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde
Contest Judges
Ellen LaFleche
Ellen LaFleche is a judge of our North Street Book Prize. She has worked as a journalist and women's health educator in Western Massachusetts. Her manuscript, Workers' Rites, won the Philbrick Poetry Award from the Providence Athenaeum and was published as a chapbook in 2011. Another chapbook, Ovarian, was published in 2011 by the Dallas Poets Community Press, and a third chapbook, Beatrice, about a semi-cloistered nun, was published in 2012 by Tiger's Eye Press. Her poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Hunger Mountain, New Millennium Writings, The Ledge, Alligator Juniper, Many Mountains Moving, Harpur Palate, Southeast Review, and Naugatuck River Review, among many others. Prose credits include her 2014 Daily Hampshire Gazette article "Taken too soon, at 65: My husband John Clobridge's final days with ALS". She also reviews books for Wordgathering, the online journal of disability poetics. She has won the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Poetry Prize (shared with Jim Glenn Thatcher), the DASH Poetry Journal Prize, the Poets on Parnassus Prize for poetry about the medical experience, second prize in The Ledge Poetry Awards, and the Editor's Choice Award for Poetry from Writecorner Press.
Contest Judges
Annie Mydla
Annie Mydla is the managing editor of Winning Writers. She oversees staff in Poland, assists with the administration and judging of our North Street Book Prize, critiques books and manuscripts, moderates our forum on Reddit, and helps maintain our website. She is a literary scholar and writer. Born in Boston, she spent her childhood and early adulthood in Rhode Island and Western Massachusetts. She now resides in Poland, where she pursues research in supernatural fiction, crime fiction, and Joseph Conrad. Her work has been published in English in The Yearbook of Joseph Conrad Studies (2017), Avant Literary Journal (2017), and in Polish translation in Tajemni wspólnicy: czytelnik, widz i tłumacz (Secret Sharers: Reader, Viewer and Translator, 2017). She is a regular contributor to the official publication of the Joseph Conrad Society of America, Joseph Conrad Today, and was the Conference Secretary of the VII International Conrad Conference at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland.
Contest Judges
Sarah Halper
Sarah Halper is an assistant judge of our North Street Book Prize and our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She earned her undergraduate degree in English History and Literature at Harvard and her graduate degree at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Contest Judges
Briana Grogan
Briana Grogan (she/they), assistant judge of our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, is a Black queer femme from Southern California. Her poetry found form in San Francisco, where they currently live and work as a bookstore clerk. She received her MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Their writing explores the silence in grief and the joy in healing. She was an artist in residence at Art House San Clemente, the Guest Poetry Editor for Foglifter Journal Vol. 8, and a finalist for the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work can be found in Foglifter Journal, The Ana, and is upcoming in When We Exhale and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Photo by Lauren Hanussak
