The Massachusetts Book Awards

Each year the Massachusetts Center for the Book presents The Massachusetts Book Awards, recognizing significant works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s and young adults’ literature published by Commonwealth residents or about Massachusetts subjects.  The Massachusetts Center for the Book, chartered as the Commonwealth Affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, is a public-private partnership charged with developing, supporting, and promoting cultural programming to advance the cause of books and reading and enhance the outreach potential of Massachusetts libraries.

The 20th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards were announced on September 9, 2020, for books published in 2019.  All award books are added to Special Collections at the State Library of Massachusetts and featured at the National Book Festival.

The YALSA Book Awards

FOSEL’s current display of Book Award Winners is the Young Adults Library Services Association (YALSA), which honors the best teen literature each year with its six literary awards, announced each year at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. This year’s YALSA winner is Dig, by the acclaimed author A.S. King, who has been called “one of the best Y.A. writers working today” by the New York Times Book Review. In addition to Dig, the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award winner and a LA Times Book Prize finalist, King is the author of the 2016's Still Life with Tornado, 2015’s surrealist I Crawl Through It, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, Reality Boy, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Ask the Passengers, Everybody Sees the Ants, 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz among others. King, who also writes Middle Grade fiction under the name of Amy Sarig King, is a faculty member of the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has taught literacy to adults in Ireland, and lives in Pennsylvania.