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A message from one of our trusted
partners:
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North
Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books
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Deadline: June 30, 2021
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Winning
Writers will award a grand prize of $5,000 in the seventh annual
North Street competition for self-published books, co-sponsored by
BookBaby and Carolyn Howard-Johnson (author of The Frugal Book Promoter).
Choose from
seven categories:
- Mainstream/Literary Fiction
- Genre Fiction
- Creative Nonfiction & Memoir
- Poetry
- Children’s Picture Book
- Graphic Novel & Memoir
- Art Book (new!)
$13,750
will be awarded in all, and the top eight winners will receive
additional benefits to help market their books. Any year of
publication is eligible. Entry fee: $65 per book.
Submit
online via Submittable or by mail. Winning Writers is a partner
member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and this contest is
recommended by Reedsy. Click to learn more
about our contest.
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Winners of
Our 2020 Contest
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Final judges:
Jendi Reiter and Ellen LaFleche, assisted by Annie Mydla and Jim
DuBois
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2020 Grand Prize
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Christine
Mulvey, Mine to Carry
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Ellen LaFleche
writes, “Mine to Carry
is by far the strongest book I’ve encountered during the years
I’ve helped to judge this contest. The writing is a perfectly
woven tapestry of lyric description, narrative, dialogue, story,
and philosophical and religious musings. It’s extremely hard to
weave multiple strands into a perfect literary garment but Mulvey
has done just that. We give this book the highest praise. It’s an
important historical document about the intersection of women’s
rights and cultural and legal norms.”
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2020 First Prize, Children’s
Picture Book
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Jerald
Pope, Fetch
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Jendi Reiter
writes, “In this wordless illustrated narrative, an old man and
his shaggy dog go out to a windswept field of tall grass to chase
a ball…one last time. This gentle story will speak to readers of
all ages who have lost a loved one. I appreciated the subtlety of
Fetch, a
restraint that was suited to its theme. It didn’t feel
manipulatively hopeful and upbeat like some more cutesy picture
books about bereavement.”
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2020 First Prize, Graphic Novel &
Memoir
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Ingrid
Pierre, Do Not Resuscitate
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Ellen LaFleche
writes, “A young woman having a difficult time accepting her
boyfriend John’s death from cancer is at first overjoyed when he
comes back from the dead. But even as the reunited couple make
love and bathe and continue on with daily activities, the man’s body
begins to decompose. As the boyfriend’s re-animated body
continues to vanish, the couple work hard to come to terms with
how they behaved toward each other in life, grappling with urgent
haste to understand and honor their lost relationship in all its
complexity: the good, the bad, the mundane, the loyalties, the
betrayals, the joys, the losses.”
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2020 First Prize, Poetry
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Caleb
Rainey, Look, Black Boy
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Jendi Reiter
writes, “Look, Black
Boy has the rhythmic verve and immediacy of
spoken-word poetry, yet loses nothing in its transition to print.
Rather, Rainey takes advantage of the visual medium to experiment
with line spacing, punctuation, and layout in ways that add
dramatic tension to his accounts of Black struggle and joy. The
poem that caught at my heart and lingered in my memory was ‘A
Letter From Red Kool-Aid.’ The personified drink expresses a
childlike bewilderment at the premature violent death—implied but
not fully comprehended—of the boy who used to love this treat.”
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2020 First Prize, Creative
Nonfiction & Memoir
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Alicia
Doyle, Fighting Chance
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Jendi Reiter
writes, “Award-winning journalist Alicia Doyle’s unique,
fast-paced memoir recounts her transformation into an amateur
boxer in the late 1990s, and how this demanding sport helped her
process her buried rage and pain from a volatile childhood. Throughout
the retelling of her sports career, Doyle constantly reflects on
the ethics of dealing out and receiving punches, and what it
tells her about her own psychology.”
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2020 First Prize,
Mainstream/Literary Fiction
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Jolie
P. Hoang, Anchorless
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Ellen
LaFleche writes, “The opening paragraphs of Jolie Hoang’s
compelling novel (based on true events) not only showcase her
beautifully rendered lyric prose, but pull the reader into her
family’s story of escape from the war in Vietnam, retold in vivid
detail through the words of her father’s ghost. The book
successfully straddles fiction and memoir; there is a haunting
magical realism to the writing that creates a dual sense of
reality/unreality. I am awed at how much horror, beauty, and joy
Jolie Hoang packed into 100 pages.”
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2020 First Prize, Genre Fiction
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Rachael
A.Z. Mutabingwa, Kunda
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Ellen
LaFleche writes, “A lush blend of magic realism, tropical island
life, spirituality, civil war, and love and loss, this is the
story of two families connected by a pregnant woman who
time-travels between the 19th and 20th centuries. The 20th-century
family finds itself returning to its spiritual heritage—a subplot
that helps to connect characters separated by some 100 years—when
modern medicine cannot help their young son who is dying of
cystic fibrosis.”
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Read about the winning entries from all our
previous North Street contests in our Contest Archives.
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