Teresa Tennyson Wins the $10,000 Grand Prize in Our 11th Annual North Street Book Prize Competition
Winning Writers is pleased to announce the results from its 11th annual North Street Book Prize competition. Teresa Tennyson of North Sandwich, New Hampshire, won this year's Grand Prize across all genres for her speculative novel Five Years, which focuses on a small New England town's response to humanity's imminent extinction as bees and other key flora and fauna succumb to climate change and ecological degradation. Ending on a tentatively hopeful note, this absorbing tale is a testament to the value of democratic norms, especially at times when we are most tempted to abandon them.
Teresa received $10,000, a marketing analysis and one-hour phone consultation with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, a $500 credit at BookBaby, two blurbs from published authors as part of the Atmosphere Press Blurb Matchmaking program, a public author interview at atmospherepress.com, free lodging at the Atmosphere Press oceanside condo in Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica, free developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading from Gatekeeper Press, three months of Pro service (a $207 value) and a $250 account credit from Book Award Pro, a book cover consultation from Laura Duffy Design (a $1,100 value), and 3 free ads in the Winning Writers newsletter (a $525 value).
These category winners received $1,000 each:
- Geir and Kate Jordahl of Bellingham, Washington, won First Prize–Art Book for The Endless Sphere of Time, which pairs circular black-and-white photographs of liminal spaces in nature and architecture with poetry by Norwegian modernist Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Roger Greenwald.
- Katherine Lockwood of Sandwich, Massachusetts, won First Prize–Children's Picture Book for My Body Beeps! Growing Up with Diabetes, about an active little girl who just wants to play hide-and-seek like her other friends, but she is worried about the sound of her glucose monitor giving her away.
- Ben Stubenberg of the Turks & Caicos Islands won First Prize–Creative Nonfiction & Memoir for The Jamaican Bobsled Captain, a fast-paced, character-driven work of narrative journalism that tells the real story behind the Olympic team that inspired the 1990s Disney comedy Cool Runnings.
- Jessica Mann of Driggs, Idaho, won First Prize–Genre Fiction for her ecological fantasy novel Uplift, a story of interspecies cooperation through the coming-of-age journey of a Clark's Nutcracker, a bird of the high mountains of the American West and a member of the crow family.
- Jacoby A. Matott of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, won First Prize–Graphic Novel & Memoir for Pumpkin Guts: The Hellbound Halloween, a colorfully grotesque homage to teen slasher movies, set at a cursed carnival on Halloween night.
- Rashid Darden of Conway, North Carolina, won First Prize–Mainstream/Literary Fiction for A Peculiar Legacy, a loving portrayal of a tight-knit Black neighborhood in Washington, DC, where a newly arrived gay couple and a Quaker matriarch do their best to mentor the local teenagers after one of the youths is murdered.
- Michael Wardner of Pine Lake, Georgia, won First Prize–Middle Grade for Kris Kringle and the Great Magic Swindle, a witty romp about Santa and his friends battling a villainous magician.
- Kathleen Spivack of Watertown, Massachusetts, won First Prize–Poetry for Homage, a chapbook composed of tributes to guiding figures in her life as an artist.
The category winners each received $1,000, a marketing analysis and one-hour phone consultation with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, a $300 credit at BookBaby, a public author interview at atmospherepress.com, 50% off developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading from Gatekeeper Press, three months of Pro service from Book Award Pro (a $207 value), design for a custom merchandise item based on the winner's book cover from Laura Duffy Design, and one free ad in the Winning Writers newsletter (a $175 value); the winning children's picture book author also received a phone consultation from April Cox at Self-Publishing Made Simple (a $289 value) and access to Authorpreneur Summit sessions (an $89 value).
We received 1,734 entries from around the world. Final judge Jendi Reiter was assisted by Annie Mydla, Sarah Halper, Paweł Zagawa, Ewa Stachyra, and Mateusz Naporowski. Book feedback was also contributed by Jakub Karolczyk and Greta Rosenberger. Grace LeClair helped us return the books for those who requested that service. Read about the winning entries. Read about the competition.
Published: February 15, 2026
