The Holmes Public Library

Featured Booklist - 10th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards

The Massachusetts Center for the Book announced this year’s award winners in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s/young adult literature at the Massachusetts Library Association annual conference.

The awards recognize significant books by Massachusetts writers or about Massachusetts subjects that were published in the preceding year. Established in 2000, when the Massachusetts Center for the Book was formally affiliated in the Commonwealth, the awards trace the vitality of 21st-century Massachusetts literary life.

The Massachusetts Book Awards are a program of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, the Commonwealth affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. It works with and through libraries to promote books, reading, and literacy while highlighting the literary culture of Massachusetts. Partners in the Center are Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, Boston Athenaeum, Boston Public Library, Simmons College GSLIS. The Center also receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Mass Humanities, and the Library of Congress.

Fiction

Award Winner: Woodsburner by John Pipkin

Day After Night by Anita Diamant
Four Freedoms by John Crowley
History of Now by Daniel Klein
Hound by Vincent McCaffrey
Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl
Mrs. Somebody Somebody by Tracy Winn.
Shelter Me by Juliette Fay
Stealing Fatima by Frank X. Gaspar
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
Triple Time by Anne Sanow

Nonfiction

Award Winner: American Passage by Vincent Cannato

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
Black Walden by Elise Lemire
A Brave Vessel by Hobson Woodward
Dogtown by Elyssa East
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf
The Fence by Dick Lehr
The Finest Hours by Michael J. Tougias & Casey Sherman
Fresh Pond by Jill Sinclair
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser
Louisa May Alcott byHarriet Reisen
You Better Not Cry by Augusten Burroughs

Poetry

Award Winner: This is the Red Door by James R. Whitley

Evidence by Mary Oliver
History of Hurricanes by Teresa Cader
Long Division by Andrea Cohen
The Looking House by Fred Marchant
Lost Alphabet by Lisa Olstein
The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems by David Slavitt
Steerage by Bert Stern
The Unpredictability of Light by Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard
The Us by Joan Houlihan
A Village Life by Louise Glück
Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright