by Beth Staats
Quick Summary
Interested in reading Minnesota Book Award winners? Several 2024 winning titles are offered in Ebooks Minnesota.
Award for Genre Fiction, sponsored by Macalester College:
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
Two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection. In the process, they uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined.
Törzs is a writer, occasional translator, and teacher at Macalester College. Her fiction has been honored with an NEA fellowship in prose, a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize. Her stories have been published in journals such as Ploughshares, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and American Short Fiction.
Award for Memoir & Creative Nonfiction, sponsored by Bradshaw Celebration of Life Centers:
Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History by Emily Strasser
In 1942, the U.S. government constructed a 60,000-acre planned community in rural Tennessee. Oak Ridge attracted more than 70,000 people eager for high-paying wartime jobs, who didn’t know it was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Strasser exposes the toxic legacy that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world.
Strasser’s award-winning essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and elsewhere. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.
Award for Novel & Short Story, sponsored by Minnesota Humanities Center:
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power
From mid-century Chicago to the ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, this is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried. The novel is ultimately hopeful and shines a light on the echoing damage wrought by Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people.
Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She is the author of three previously published works of fiction, The Grass Dancer, Sacred Wilderness, and Roofwalker. Power is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Award for Young Adult Literature, sponsored by Minnesota Humanities Center:
The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney
This novel is woven from the author’s true story of growing up as the adopted Black daughter of white parents and the fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Gibney was given at birth by the white woman who gave her up for adoption. It is a tale of two girls on different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins.
Gibney is an author and university professor. Her novel See No Color, drawn from her life as a transracial adoptee, was hailed by Kirkus as “an exceptionally accomplished debut” and by Publishers Weekly as “an unflinching look at the complexities of racial identity.” Her sophomore novel, Dream Country, received five-star reviews and earned her a second Minnesota Book Award.
[Reprinted from https://thefriends.org/2024/05/08/2024-minnesota-book-award-winners/]
