2025 AWA FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR

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 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.

   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 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.