Mar

Barnes and Noble Names Book Award Winners

Barnes and Noble hosted a ceremony today in New York where they announced the winners of this year’s Discover Great New Writers Award. The award, first presented in 1990 and now in its 22nd year, is bestowed on new and undiscovered authors whose work has great literary merit.

This year’s fiction category winner is Amanda Coplin for The Orchardist, while the non-fiction winner was Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, published by HarperCollins and Alfred A. Knopf, respectively. Second and third place honorees in the fiction category were Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles and The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey; the non-fiction second and third place winners were Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen.

In addition to the monetary awards presented to each of the top three honorees in both fiction and non-fiction, these titles, along with other mentionable works, will be featured in promotions from Barnes and Noble. The goal of the award and the inclusion in the honor is to enable readers to more readily find these works that may otherwise have been lost among the many titles sold by the online retailer, especially as more entities are working to address the obstacles to book discovery.

This award parallels the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, which are open to a decidedly more self-published pool of authors. The ABNA awards have finished the first-round cuts and will continue through different stages until the final presentation in late spring.

Mercy Pilkington (1079 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com