2025 AWA FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
ADAM SKOLNICK
Adam Skolnick is an author and journalist who has been telling stories for twenty years. Stories that are thrilling, enlightening and entertaining. Stories geared to pierce your bubble, expand your sense of self, and the mysteries and possibilities at our fingertips.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Wired, Lonely Planet, and Men’s Health. He’s the author of One Breath: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits, and is best known as the ghostwriter and audiobook narrator of the bestselling David Goggins memoirs, Can’t Hurt Me and Never Finished. A frequent contributor on the Rich Roll podcast, he lives in Southern California where he was born and raised. His debut novel, American Tiger, drops in December 2025.
FULL BOOK TITLE: American Tiger
AUTHOR NAME: Adam Skolnick
PUBLISHER NAME: Lioncrest Publishing
A motherless nine-year-old girl glances out her school bus window and notices a tiger licking its paws behind Target. Nobody else sees it and nobody believes her, not even her father, a local game warden, because it is well known that Bell Tern has an untamed imagination. But evidence mounts and with it, the possibility that Bell is telling the truth and a most unlikely predator could be prowling a seemingly placid suburb of Los Angeles.
Based on true events, rooted in the stunning Southern California landscape, and populated with vivid characters, American Tiger is about more than a frantic tiger hunt. It's about a child's quest for self-discovery, her stoic father's struggle to come to terms with their past, and the innate wildness of every living thing.
2025 AWA FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
FULL BOOK TITLE: The Women Who Stand Between
AUTHOR NAME: Jeannee Sacken
PUBLISHER NAME: Ten 16 Press, an imprint of Orange Hat Publishing
FULL BOOK TITLE: Later Days
AUTHOR NAME: Chip Jacobs
PUBLISHER NAME: Rare Bird Books
2025 AWA NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
Looking back on her remarkable career, Retired Army Colonel Edna W. Cummings can justly say that “the odds ain’t good, but good stuff happens.” Her story is as inspiring as it is improbable, but her memoir is about much more than herself. Chronicling Cummings’s unlikely but successful path to leadership roles in the army and afterward, it also tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, known as the Six Triple Eight—a trailblazing African American World War II Women’s Army Corps unit now the subject of a Netflix film and a Broadway-bound musical—and the grassroots campaign Cummings led to honor them.
In 2022, due in large part to Cummings’s efforts, the Six Triple Eight was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor—the Congressional Gold Medal. Among the fewer than two hundred recipients, including the crew of Apollo 11 and the Navajo Code Talkers, the Six Triple Eight is the only women’s unit to receive this prestigious decoration. In A Soldier’s Life Colonel Cummings narrates her path from childhood to advocate and how she overcame incredible odds not only for herself but on behalf of those who had come before her.
FULL BOOK TITLE: A Soldier’s Life: A Black Woman’s Rise from Army Brat to Six Triple Eight Champion
AUTHOR NAME: Col. (Ret.) Edna W. Cummings, U.S. Army
PUBLISHER NAME: University of Virginia Press
EDNA W. CUMMINGS
EDNA W. CUMMINGS
Edna W. Cummings is a retired United States Army colonel, advocate, and author. She was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and grew up in an Army family. In 1978, she was the first Black woman to graduate from Appalachian State University's Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program.
2025 AWA NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALISTS
FULL BOOK TITLE: Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom
AUTHOR NAME: McCracken Poston Jr.
PUBLISHER NAME: Citadel
FULL BOOK TITLE: Hope on the Border
AUTHOR NAME: Gil Gillenwater
PUBLISHER NAME: University of Pemako Press
CONGRATULATIONS 2025 SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNERS!
2025 SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR
FULL BOOK TITLE: The House Divided: The Story of the First Congressional Baseball Game AUTHOR NAME: J.B. Manheim
PUBLISHER NAME: Sunbury Press
Most years since 1909, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have squared off in a good-natured contest -- the Congressional Baseball Game. Once a modest affair, the event now draws nearly thirty thousand fans and raises more than one million dollars annually for local charities.
This is the story of the very first congressional game. Contemporaneous news accounts were whimsical, to say the least, and the few brief retrospectives on that game have reflected that whimsy. But the fact is that, even as the participants were as light-hearted as the reporters, the first of these games had a most serious purpose.
This is a story about a baseball game, but also one about political gamesmanship. The two were inseparable: The "game" was played to serve the purposes of the chief gamesman.
In 1909, the House of Representatives was immersed in a struggle over a single issue -- tariff reform -- that had all the elements of a sordid political drama -- special interests, sectionalism, ideological clashes, distrust, resentment, personal animosities, intense partisanship, cynicism, and money -- a great deal of money -- all presided over by House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon, a tyrannical leader with an agenda. In the heat of an unairconditioned summer, the pressure on the Hill built to an intolerable level. A safety valve was needed. Enter the Congressional Baseball Game.
Baseball as a recreational sport. Politics as a blood sport. These are the elements of our tale. And when it was over literally everything had changed.
2025 SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR RUNNER UPS
FULL BOOK TITLE: You Wouldn’t Believe Me if I Told You: An Unforgettable Memoir of Golf, Grit, and a Blue-Collar Kid on the PGA Tour
AUTHOR NAME: Jay Delsing with Will Saulsbery
PUBLISHER NAME: Mascot Books
FULL BOOK TITLE: The Bandana Express: The True Story of the 1980 Giles Spartans
AUTHOR NAME: Jeremy Haymore
PUBLISHER NAME: Koehler Books
FULL BOOK TITLE: This Is Panther Country
AUTHOR NAME: Tom McKeown
PUBLISHER NAME: Brown Books Publishing
FULL BOOK TITLE: Unrivaled: Sewanee 1899
AUTHOR NAME: Norman Jetmundsen and Karin Dupree Fecteau
PUBLISHER NAME: Shakerag Hollow Press
FULL BOOK TITLE: Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian
AUTHOR NAME: Hendrika de Vries
PUBLISHER NAME: She Writes Press
FULL BOOK TITLE: Lootie's World Run: The Extraordinary True Story of the Fastest Woman to Have Run Around the World
AUTHOR NAME: Marie Leautey
PUBLISHER NAME: Mascot Books
FULL BOOK TITLE: Stories from the Phog: Forty Years of Kansas Basketball
AUTHOR NAME: Chelan David
PUBLISHER NAME: University Press of Kansas
FULL BOOK TITLE: Out of Bounds: From Broken NBA Dreams to Redemption: The Chris Washburn Story
AUTHOR NAME: Chris Washburn and Ron Chepesiuk
PUBLISHER NAME: Wildblue Press
CONTESTS
PODCAST OF THE YEAR
CHILDREN'S BOOK INTERNATIONAL
PODCAST OF THE YEAR
DEADLINE TO ENTER: 2/15/2026
HAWTHORNE PRIZE
CHILDREN'S BOOK INTERNATIONAL
PODCAST OF THE YEAR
DEADLINE TO ENTER: 4/26/2026
CHILDREN'S BOOK INTERNATIONAL
CHILDREN'S BOOK INTERNATIONAL
CHILDREN'S BOOK INTERNATIONAL
DEADLINE TO ENTER: 3/15/2026
FEATURED PUBLISHER: VP PUBLISHING
THREE STORIES. ONE FORGOTTEN TRUTH.
A powerful historical fiction collection tracing the untold journey from Africa to the Caribbean—through prophecy, survival, and resistance.
Step into the erased history of the Americas: a haunting saga of Indigenous survival, African resilience, and the violent birth of a colonial empire.
In MOUSSANE – The River’s Daughter, a sacred healer along the Gambia River is tormented by visions of distant ships, unable to shake the sense that her world is about to break. In BEYOND – The Door of No Return, her worst fears become real as slave raiders descend—tearing Dembe, her beloved husband, from her arms and dragging him across the Middle Passage in chains. Their stories converge in Blood for Pearls, set on Cubagua, where the first African slaves and Caribbean natives are forced into the deadly pearl trade under the rule of the Spanish Crown. There, Dembe and Charaima unite to defy an empire built on blood and greed.
These are the stories they never taught — the first genocide, the first enslavement, and the voices that refused to be silenced.
AUTHOR PROFILE
Peter Von Perle is an American researcher and writer who was born and raised in Venezuela, where he developed a lifelong passion for saltwater pearls and the history that accompanies them.
Peter found his way into the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS© when he was involved with the largest concentration of pearls, and his subsequent trailer and screenplay BLOOD FOR PEARLS won him numerous awards at Film Festivals around the world.
Since 2011, Peter has been traveling the world, interviewing a myriad of experts, and unearthing new and important facts surrounding this controversial period of world history.
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