We have a new cadre of Oregon Book Award winners, the prized title bestowed upon the state's storytellers by letters-loving nonprofit Literary Arts. In addition to seven awards for works in specific genre categories, the organization also recognized the founders of two reading-focused efforts—Street Books and A Kids Co.—at a special ceremony Monday night.
Street Books founder Laura Moulton accepted the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, which recognizes "significant contributions that have enriched Oregon’s literary community." Moulton started out in 2011, with a RACC grant to fund a mobile library for people living outside, day laborers, and low-income residents. Over time, the little book carts pulled by cargo bikes have come to additionally carry social services resource guides, pamphlets and zines about legal rights, blankets, hygiene products, and harm-reduction supplies, like Narcan/naloxone and fentanyl test strips.
Jelani Memory, founder of A Kids Co., accepted the Walt Morey Young Readers Literary Legacy Award to recognize his children's book company's contributions to young readers—publishing over 30 books on difficult / oft-avoided subjects like racism, menstruation, empathy, and self-harm, among others.
From 212 titles submitted to the 2025 awards for genre works, panels of out-of-state judges whittled down 35 finalists. The finalists and winners from each category are below. Literary Arts alternates its awards for published play scripts and graphic literature every other year, and 2025 is a year to recognize drama. Comics are back on the menu next year.
FICTION, Ken Kesey Award
Miriam Gershow, Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books)
Victor Lodato, Honey (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers)
WINNER: Kimberly King Parsons, We Were the Universe (Knopf/Penguin Random House)
Charlie J. Stephens, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest (Torrey House Press)
Willy Vlautin, The Horse (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers)
POETRY, Stafford / Hall Award
Alisha Dietzman, Sweet Movie (Beacon Press)
Brian S. Ellis, Against Common Sense (Limit Zero Publications)
Darla Mottram, Recurrent (Querencia Press)
Valerie Witte, A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie Press)
WINNER: Charity E. Yoro, ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press)
GENERAL NONFICTION, Frances Fuller Victor Award
WINNER: Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking Books/Penguin Random House)
Kimberly Jensen, Oregon’s Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century (University of Washington Press)
Catherine McNeur, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group)
Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press)
Reiko Hillyer, A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States (Duke University Press)
CREATIVE NONFICTION, Susan Winnemuca Award
Becky Ellis, Little Avalanches: A Memoir (Regalo Press)
Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life (Random House/Penguin Random House)
WINNER: Jaclyn Moyer, On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California (Beacon Press)
Tim Palmer, Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis (University of California Press)
Marlena Williams, Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press)
DRAMA, Angus L. Bowmer Award
E.M. Lewis, Strange Birds
Rich Rubin, Kafka’s Joke
Andrea Stolowitz, Elegy Play
Ken Yoshikawa, From a Hole in the Ground
WINNER: Brianna Barrett, Still Harvey Still
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, Elise Jarvis McGraw Award
WINNER: Anne Broyles, I'm Gonna Paint: Ralph Fasanella, Artist of the People (Holiday House)
Dane Liu , Laolao's Dumplings (Henry Holt BYR/Macmillan Publishing Group)
Leslie Barnard Booth, A Stone Is a Story (Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster)
Leslie Barnard Booth, One Day This Tree Will Fall (Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster)
Deborah Hopkinson Evidence!: How Dr. John Snow Solved the Mystery of Cholera (Knopf BYR/Penguin Random House)
MIDDLE GRADE / YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE, Leslie Bradshaw Award
WINNER: April Henry, Stay Dead (Christy Ottaviano Books of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers/Hachette Book Group)
Deborah Hopkinson, The Plot to Kill a Queen (Scholastic Press)
Megan Lally, That's Not My Name (Sourcebooks Fire/Sourcebooks)
Makiia Lucier, Dragonfruit (Clarion Books/HarperCollins Publishers)
Elizabeth Rusch, The Twenty-One: The True Story of the Youth Who Sued the US Government Over Climate Change (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins Publishers)
