Koh approaches her historical novel with an unwavering interest in the human heart & the way politics, war, & things of such scale affect the realms of intimacy and interpersonal relationships. Koh uses language with the utmost elegance, her prose is poetic & confident with imagistic, memorable metaphors. Her characters feel flesh & bone; yearning …
Fiction Winner: The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (HarperCollins) Fiction Finalists: The Second Star by Alma Alexander (Crossroad Press) Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories by Donna Miscolta (Jaded Ibis Press) Vera Violet by Melissa Anne Peterson (Counterpoint Press) The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite (Avon Impulse) Biography and Memoir Winner: The Magical Language of Others by E.J. …
On the livestreaming event celebrating the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award Winners, an audience member asked the authors for book recommendations. Here are some of the books that came up, some literally pulled from stacks near the authors for show and tell: Entangled Life (recommended by Silvia Morena-Garcia) The Gilded Ones (recommended by Kim Johnson. …
One silver lining from no travel and minimizing in-person contact is that event access is not geographically-dependent. This year, it means that the celebration of 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award-winning the authors and books is online and open to all registered book lovers. The event will be presented as a Zoom webinar Wednesday, February 10 …
When I was fifteen, my parents returned to South Korea and left me behind with my brother in America. My mother started writing me letters in Korean, a language I could not fully understand at the time. Over a decade after she wrote me, I translated her letters into English. In one letter, she writes: …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Awards have 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. Since 1965, the annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, …
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association is happy to announce the 2021 Book Awards Shortlist, selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. This year’s committee chose the following 12 finalists, crafted by Northwest authors and illustrators, from a list of nearly 400 nominated titles published during 2020. The six …
Last Friday afternoon, as part of the week’s virtual regional trade show, booksellers from around the Pacific Northwest watched members of the PNBA Book Awards Committee present a selection of books they are excited about for the 2021 Book Awards. This post is the second part of the list of books mentioned during that session. …
This mesmerizing memoir by poet and translator E. J. Koh explores immigration, motherhood, familial bonds, love, trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation. It takes the reader from San Francisco to Korea to Japan. I found it to be a gorgeous, lyrical, painful, poignant and hopeful read. –Janis Segress, Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, WA Explore language and …
