Below is the list of GWP award-winning books for the 2021 publishing season!
It is always a good idea to submit to book awards for an author’s publishing season, though sometimes it can get expensive to do so. GWP is a member of the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association), so we offer our authors a discount through our membership. We always encourage authors to submit because winning an award, or becoming a finalist, brings on the accolades, ego-boosting, and overall recognition for all the hard work that went into making books!
We had a fantastic surprise for the 2021 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards: a debut novel we published entitled Faron Goss won GOLD in the very competitive category of General Fiction! GWP Honors Author Diane Lechleitner, the Foreword Reviews INDIES GOLD WINNER in General Fiction! Here is a snippet from Kirkus Reviews:
When the body of Alison Goss washes up on Menhaden Island, in the Gulf of Maine, the working-class fishing community of hard-hewn ways and salty perspectives is faced with handling the future of her unusual son, Faron.
They soon discover how different he is, in strange but endearing ways, including his fascination with moths and his stunning artistic talent.
Bound together by weather and sea, Menhaden neighbors with good hearts and blunt opinions overlook Faron’s peculiarities. But their nurturing embrace cannot completely erase his troubled past, which eventually morphs into a life-changing event and forces him to confront lingering memories.
Faron faces that which haunts him, works as a sternman on a lobster boat, and paints in his studio. When he meets a bird-watching woman who has returned to Menhaden to live in her grandparents’ house, his life takes another unexpected turn.
Faron Goss was also selected for a 2021 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie book!
GWP author Nancie Laird Young was a Finalist in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Memoir category for her beautiful Tea With Dad.
“Sit back and steep yourself in Young’s reflective recounting of family stories and secrets, misconceptions and discoveries, in what ultimately proves to be the grace-infused accommodation between an aging parent and adult child, between their past and their present.”
—Jim Tomlinson, author of Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Iowa Short Fiction Award)
Yet another GWP author, Keema Waterfield, won the Bookfest Award, in not one, but FOUR categories: Memoir, Humor, Travel, Outdoors! The awards honor authors who create outstanding works of fiction and nonfiction.
Keema Waterfield’s Inside Passage is a memoir chronicling her peripatetic childhood “chasing music with her twenty-year-old mother on the Alaskan folk festival circuit” while yearning for home.
Kirkus Reviews called it “a wild remembrance that will keep readers engaged” and the late Sherry Simpson enthused, “heartbreaking but never maudlin, funny without being flip, and always, always openhearted about what survival on The Last Frontier truly means.”
The Dreamcatcher Codes was named a Young Adult Fiction Honor Book by the Green Earth Book Awards, the nation’s first environmental stewardship award for children and young adults. GEBA promotes books that inspire youth to grow a deeper understanding, respect, and responsibility for the natural environment.
The Dreamcatcher Codes was also recently awarded a 2022 Nautilus Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction! The Nautilus mission is to celebrate and honor books that support conscious living & green values, high-level wellness, positive social change & social justice, and spiritual growth.
DCC also won a Skipping Stones Award and an International Impact Award in the Multicultural category!
Congrats to ALL our wonderful authors. We are so proud of the books we publish and the authors behind them. GWP is curating our 2023 books and putting together schedules for the season. We have a few more books coming out in 2022, so let’s hope we can post more awards for this year!