North Street Book Prize 2024
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 Childrens Picture Book
Trevor Ostfeld and Iryna Chernyak, Finding Messi: The Miracle Cat from Kyiv
Honorable Mention $300
- Irene Young, Something About the Women, Art Book
- Aiden Woosol Lee, Paralights, Childrens Picture Book
- Michelle Mae, A Little Patience, Childrens Picture Book
- Leah Campbell, My Boyfriend Satan, Genre Fiction
- Jessica H. Stone, Blood on a Blue Moon, Genre Fiction
- Mindy Blumenfeld and Mark Lumer, Hillel and the Paper Menschies, Graphic Novel and Memoir
- Jessica McCann, Bitter Thaw, Literary Fiction
- Mary Jumbelic, Here, Where Death Delights, Creative Nonfiction
- Jeremy Sherr, The Noble Adventures of Beryl and Carol, Middle Grade
- Beth SKMorris, In the Aftermath: 9/11 Through a Volunteer’s Eyes, Poetry
Thanks to all our entrants in the tenth annual North Street Book Prize for self-published and hybrid-published books. We received 1,930 books across our eight categories: poetry, genre fiction, mainstream/literary fiction, creative nonfiction/memoir, children's picture book, graphic novel/memoir, art book, and middle grade (books for tweens).
The judging team consisted of our managing editor, Annie Mydla, and editorial assistant Paweł Zagawa, who screened the online entries; Sarah Halper, a scholar of English history and literature, who screened the books initially submitted as hard copies; poet Lauren Singer, who assisted with additional screening; and final judge Jendi Reiter. Annie and Sarah passed along a shortlist of about 65 books to Jendi, who enlisted Lauren's help with a dozen of the fiction and nonfiction books. Our longtime judge Ellen LaFleche has retired from Winning Writers to concentrate on her poetry; we couldn't have come this far without her!
We had another strong shortlist this year, as evidenced by our extra Honorable Mentions in Genre Fiction and Children's Picture Book. In the Art Book category, many entrants struggled with that final stage of planning that turns a collection of images into an actual book with a logical through-line. Adam Cohen, president of Winning Writers, recommends reading design guru Edward Tufte on how to organize visual information.
We often suggest focusing your memoir around a significant event within a short time period—yet this year's creative nonfiction winners had the skill to rise above that advice, producing lifetime-spanning autobiographies that succeeded because of how well they interwove historical context and dramatic anecdotes. We savored books that drew us deeply into specific professions' expertise and creativity, from circus clowning and forensic pathology to organ transplant surgery and luxury architecture.
Children's and middle-grade books did best when they understood how to bring a topic down to scale for their age group. Big subjects like war and financial insecurity should be touched upon in the context of a problem that a child that age can solve. At the same time, encouragement of a child's competence absolutely must be balanced with reassurance that adult helpers are present. An atmosphere of safety has to be re-established by the end, at least within the limited sphere of a child's concerns. Choose your illustrators carefully because a static or drab visual presentation will prevent a well-written picture book from advancing.
In both graphic novel and art book categories, this was the year of "not enough information". Don't get so artsy with your comic book that it feels like a silent movie with no title cards. Your humble judge has some face-blindness, so please try to make your characters more distinct, and use their names occasionally in the dialogue. Captions in art books should accompany the photos, not be hidden in end notes. Use them not only to identify the subject but to tell a story about why these images are presented in this order.
Fiction with a sense of place will always have an advantage over stories set in nameless cities and unidentified regions. Like body language, social context tells us a lot about the characters that otherwise has to be filled in with unrealistic expository dialogue. Location can be shorthand for economic class, political attitudes, the weight of community expectations, and the frameworks for self-understanding that are available to the characters, whether they conform to them or push back against them.
Our Winners
Grand Prize winner Dr. Linda I. Meyers' memoir The Tell is both a New York Jewish family saga and the story of a feminist awakening. Catalyzed by her mother's suicide, the author left a stifling marriage, started college, shepherded her three young sons through a show business career that included co-starring with Woody Allen in Annie Hall, and became a psychologist and psychoanalyst. This was one of those rare multi-decade autobiographies that succeeded brilliantly through its selection of pivotal events and tight focus on the theme of breaking intergenerational trauma patterns.
Art Book winner The Fig District: Some Buildings in Downtown Santa Barbara is architect Jeff Shelton's compendium of colorful patterns, photographs, and blueprints from eight whimsical multi-use dwellings that he designed in a historic California neighborhood. Everything about this book's design reflects the same detail-oriented craftsmanship as the homes it depicts, which reference the aesthetics of Andalucia and Southern Spain with custom-made terra-cotta and ceramic tiles and decorative ironwork.
Honorable Mention Irene Young's Something About the Women: Five Decades of Seeing by Irene Young is a photographic Who's Who of the lesbian and feminist music scene from the 1970s to today. The subjects of these dynamic, joyful portraits and concert photos include activist singer-songwriter Holly Near, comedian Kate Clinton, rock duo The Indigo Girls, and many other stars of the women's music festival circuit.
Children's Picture Book winner Finding Messi: The Miracle Cat from Kyiv was co-written by Trevor Ostfeld (aged 17) from New York City and Iryna Chernyak (aged 13), a Ukrainian now living in Warsaw, Poland. This beautifully illustrated, heartwarming picture book re-creates the true story of Iryna's reunion with her cat after her family fled from Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Honorable Mention Michelle Mae's sweet and funny picture book A Little Patience employs young children's love of imaginary friends to teach emotional regulation skills for the whole family.
We awarded an additional Honorable Mention to another young author, Aiden Woosol Lee, who wrote and illustrated Paralights when he was in sixth grade. It's a funny tale about a lonely ghost who brings down the power grid because modern kids are too engrossed in their phones to notice his hauntings.
Genre Fiction winner Bryan Wiggins' medical thriller The Corpse Bloom, written with expert consultation from neurosurgeon Dr. Lee Thibodeau, plunges a Boston transplant surgeon into a high-stakes ethical dilemma involving complex questions of colonialism, unequal access to healthcare, and the impunity of the rich. A strong sense of place and symbolism gave the novel a literary quality, contrasting Mexico's lush and perilous landscape with chilly corporate Boston.
Honorable Mention Leah Campbell's paranormal romance My Boyfriend Satan is a timely salvo against those who would cleave the spiritual from the erotic. In this love triangle with a theological twist, self-knowledge, consent, and desire are our personal sacred powers that high-control religions try to steal for themselves.
An additional Honorable Mention went to Jessica H. Stone's Blood on a Blue Moon, a cozy, comical murder mystery set in a Seattle-area houseboat community where an unscrupulous real estate developer faces off against activist senior citizens.
Graphic Novel winner Sven Siekmann's Time Zones dramatizes his family's attempted escape from East Germany in 1978, his parents' capture and imprisonment, and their reunion several years later in West Germany. Siekmann's minimalist, jittery black-and-white drawings express the drabness and anxiety of life behind the Iron Curtain, with clever cinematic scene transitions for a film noir feel.
Honorable Mention winner Hillel and the Paper Menschies, written by Mindy Blumenfeld with co-author and illustrator Marc Lumer, depicts a young boy's recovery from a brain tumor in a reassuring, accurate, and age-appropriate way. A cross between a picture book and a paneled graphic novel for kids, this is another good story where imaginary friends personify emotional qualities that the main character needs to cultivate.
Literary Fiction winner Michael Demaray's novella The Faller is a stark but redemptive coming-of-age story set in a rural logging community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. When he loses his parents within the space of a year—his mother to cancer, and his father to an accident he suspects is suicide—12-year-old Leif must discover how a man loves and grieves without destroying himself.
Honorable Mention winner Jessica McCann's sensitive historical novel Bitter Thaw depicts a family coming to terms with secrets that have perpetuated patterns of estrangement. This braided tale juxtaposes a war widow's forbidden interracial romance in 1950s Minnesota and her life in Phoenix with her adult son and college-age granddaughter in 1990.
Creative Nonfiction & Memoir winner Rob Mermin's Circle of Sawdust: A Circus Memoir of Mud, Myth, Mirth, Mayhem, and Magic is a rollicking six-decade journey from his early life as a European circus clown through his founding of Circus Smirkus, Vermont's youth circus. The memoir's deeper resonance is the model it provides for the artistic life, a deft balance of spontaneity and dedication that leaves no room for self-aggrandizement.
Honorable Mention winner Dr. Mary Jumbelic's memoir Here, Where Death Delights surveys her eventful career as a forensic pathologist whose cases ranged from solving small-town murders to identifying bodies from TWA Flight 800 and the World Trade Center attack.
Middle Grade winner Angelino Donnachaidh's Tamiu: A Cat's Tale is a wise and winsome fable about a young wildcat at the dawn of human civilization who visits different animal societies to see how they balance freedom with security. Enhanced with expressive pencil drawings by Fiorella Ikeue, it's one of those magical books that's clear and concise enough for middle-grade readers, while containing deep lessons for adults to ponder.
Honorable Mention winner Jeremy Sherr's The Noble Adventures of Beryl and Carol features two athletic and independent 12-year-old girls who track down stolen treasure in their small English town in 1997.
Poetry winner Stephen C. Pollock's elegant collection Exits is held together by supple formal inventiveness and a thematic focus on mortality. This universally humbling subject inspires not only melancholy but moments of humor and awe at our small place in the natural world.
Honorable Mention winner Beth SKMorris's poetry collection In the Aftermath: 9/11 Through a Volunteer's Eyes ponders how a historical catastrophe, in this case the Twin Towers attack, can be over-memorialized and under-analyzed, becoming just one more occasion for memes, action movies, annual displays of patriotic sentiment, and tourist attractions.
Read our press release about our winners. Our eleventh North Street Book Prize competition is open from February 15 through July 1, 2025.
We would like to recognize and encourage these finalists in our tenth contest. They all received free private critiques from Winning Writers (value $90-$240).
Children's Picture Book
Sherry Roseberry, Miss Sally Ann Appleque's Costume Ball
Shari Schwert, The Trouble with Bubble Gum
Joel Shoemaker, Silas on Sundays
Blas Telleria, My Father Once Told Me
Genre Fiction
D.C. Emerson, They Were Roommates
Literary Fiction
Esteban Guillermo Zanetti, His Once Innocent Son
Memoir
Bonnie Bley, Stolen Voices
Sarah Hickner, Finding Gideon
Middle Grade
Carla Solomon, An Extra-Ordinary Mystery
Charles B. Warren, Address Unknown
Poetry
River Dandelion, remembering (y)our light
Rick Lupert, It's Spritz O'Clock Somewhere
Nita Penfold, The Woman with the Wild-Grown Hair
Phlaurel Possible, Notes for a Time Traveler's Lover (email the author to learn more)
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
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
Lauren Singer
Lauren Singer is an assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest and North Street Book Prize, and a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She is a native New Yorker living in Western Massachusetts. Her poetry has been published in Nerve House, Bareback, Feel the Word, Read This, Kosmosis, One Night Stanzas, and other literary magazines across the country. An attendee of the New York State Summer Writer's Institute, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon's Rock and received her MSW at the University of Chicago in 2015. She has self-published three chapbooks and received an honorable mention in the 2011 Wergle Flomp contest. In addition to her creative interests, Lauren works as a sex and relationship therapist and runs a private practice out of Northampton, MA. Her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in April of 2025. She prides herself on her wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, namely of nineties R&B lyrics, and she can pretty much quote "The X-Files".
Contest Judges
Paweł Zagawa
Paweł Zagawa is an editorial assistant with responsibilities in contest administration, judging the North Street Book Prize, marketing research, and critiques. Paweł lives in Poland and has a master’s degree in English Literature. In his academic journey, he has written cultural criticisms of contemporary issues and analyzed literature, especially in regards to the topic of his master's thesis, the Victorian fin de siècle.
