The shortlist for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards has been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The Association produces educational and promotional events and materials for its members and offers literacy, free …
One of the many wonderful things about winning this award is being officially reminded that I now belong to the Pacific Northwest. It has been five years since we moved to Portland, my wife’s hometown, and my extended family spent the first several years worrying that I wouldn’t be happy here. I grew up in …
Winter evenings by the wood stove present just the right opportunity for revisiting a classic book. And for anyone who studies and writes about natural history, as I do, few titles are more foundational than Walden by Henry David Thoreau. It’s the sort of text that gets quoted more than read, however, and I couldn’t recall …
Washington Black is a novel about a boy of precarious visibilities: he is all too visible to those who would demean his humanity; he is all too invisible to those who might recognize his gifts and value his very real potential to make great contributions to the world. Born an eleven-year old field slave in …
I’d been reading picture books to my kids for years before writing my own. I’d always taken pleasure in them but never really considered what a deep art form the genre is. It took creating Libba to figure that out.First, let’s take the words. Like in a song or poem, I wanted to get them just right. …
I was born in Seattle, at Swedish First Hill, but my family moved away when I was a baby. My parents had grown up in Queen Anne and Ballard, attended Seattle Pacific University, and pastored their first church in Renton. So every summer, my family made the long drive from our home in San Diego …
There’s a scene in A False Report I think of often. Stacy Galbraith, a police detective in Golden, Colorado, goes home after work. She tells her husband about a case she’s working—a rape investigation with all kinds of chilling twists. Her husband works at another police department, nearby. He listens, then tells her: We’ve got …
PNBA member authors and Award Winners are listed alphabetically. For information about joining PNBA, contact PNBA.org A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ Diana Abu-Jaber dianaabujaber.com Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of four novels and numerous short stories, essays and articles published in Salon, The Washington Post, …