150 Award Genres
Children
- Children - Action
- Children - Adventure
- Children - Animals
- Children - Audiobook
- Children - Christian
- Children - Coming of Age
- Children - Concept
- Children - Educational
- Children - Fable
- Children - Fantasy/Sci-Fi
- Children - General
- Children - Grade 4th-6th
- Children - Grade K-3rd
- Children - Mystery
- Children - Mythology/Fairy Tale
- Children - Non-Fiction
- Children - Picture Book
- Children - Preschool
- Children - Preteen
- Children - Religious Theme
- Children - Social Issues
Christian
- Christian - Amish
- Christian - Biblical Counseling
- Christian - Devotion/Study
- Christian - Fantasy/Sci-Fi
- Christian - Fiction
- Christian - General
- Christian - Historical Fiction
- Christian - Living
- Christian - Non-Fiction
- Christian - Romance - Contemporary
- Christian - Romance - General
- Christian - Romance - Historical
- Christian - Thriller
Fiction
- Fiction - Action
- Fiction - Adventure
- Fiction - Animals
- Fiction - Anthology
- Fiction - Audiobook
- Fiction - Chick Lit
- Fiction - Crime
- Fiction - Cultural
- Fiction - Drama
- Fiction - Dystopia
- Fiction - Fantasy - Epic
- Fiction - Fantasy - General
- Fiction - Fantasy - Urban
- Fiction - General
- Fiction - Graphic Novel/Comic
- Fiction - Historical - Event/Era
- Fiction - Historical - Personage
- Fiction - Holiday
- Fiction - Horror
- Fiction - Humor/Comedy
- Fiction - Inspirational
- Fiction - Intrigue
- Fiction - LGBTQ
- Fiction - Literary
- Fiction - Magic/Wizardry
- Fiction - Military
- Fiction - Mystery - General
- Fiction - Mystery - Historical
- Fiction - Mystery - Legal
- Fiction - Mystery - Murder
- Fiction - Mystery - Sleuth
- Fiction - Mythology
- Fiction - New Adult
- Fiction - Paranormal
- Fiction - Realistic
- Fiction - Religious Theme
- Fiction - Science Fiction
- Fiction - Short Story/Novela
- Fiction - Social Issues
- Fiction - Southern
- Fiction - Sports
- Fiction - Supernatural
- Fiction - Suspense
- Fiction - Tall Tale
- Fiction - Thriller - Conspiracy
- Fiction - Thriller - Environmental
- Fiction - Thriller - Espionage
- Fiction - Thriller - General
- Fiction - Thriller - Legal
- Fiction - Thriller - Medical
- Fiction - Thriller - Political
- Fiction - Thriller - Psychological
- Fiction - Thriller - Terrorist
- Fiction - Time Travel
- Fiction - Urban
- Fiction - Visionary
- Fiction - Western
- Fiction - Womens
Non-Fiction
- Non-Fiction - Adventure
- Non-Fiction - Animals
- Non-Fiction - Anthology
- Non-Fiction - Art/Photography
- Non-Fiction - Audiobook
- Non-Fiction - Autobiography
- Non-Fiction - Biography
- Non-Fiction - Business/Finance
- Non-Fiction - Cooking/Food
- Non-Fiction - Cultural
- Non-Fiction - Drama
- Non-Fiction - Education
- Non-Fiction - Environment
- Non-Fiction - Genealogy
- Non-Fiction - General
- Non-Fiction - Gov/Politics
- Non-Fiction - Grief/Hardship
- Non-Fiction - Health - Fitness
- Non-Fiction - Health - Medical
- Non-Fiction - Historical
- Non-Fiction - Hobby
- Non-Fiction - Home/Crafts
- Non-Fiction - Humor/Comedy
- Non-Fiction - Inspirational
- Non-Fiction - LGBTQ
- Non-Fiction - Marketing
- Non-Fiction - Memoir
- Non-Fiction - Military
- Non-Fiction - Motivational
- Non-Fiction - Music/Entertainment
- Non-Fiction - New Age
- Non-Fiction - Occupational
- Non-Fiction - Parenting
- Non-Fiction - Relationships
- Non-Fiction - Religion/Philosophy
- Non-Fiction - Retirement
- Non-Fiction - Self Help
- Non-Fiction - Short Story/Novela
- Non-Fiction - Social Issues
- Non-Fiction - Spiritual/Supernatural
- Non-Fiction - Sports
- Non-Fiction - Travel
- Non-Fiction - True Crime
- Non-Fiction - Womens
- Non-Fiction - Writing/Publishing
Poetry
Romance
Young Adult
- Young Adult - Action
- Young Adult - Adventure
- Young Adult - Coming of Age
- Young Adult - Fantasy - Epic
- Young Adult - Fantasy - General
- Young Adult - Fantasy - Urban
- Young Adult - General
- Young Adult - Horror
- Young Adult - Mystery
- Young Adult - Mythology/Fairy Tale
- Young Adult - Non-Fiction
- Young Adult - Paranormal
- Young Adult - Religious Theme
- Young Adult - Romance
- Young Adult - Sci-Fi
- Young Adult - Social Issues
- Young Adult - Thriller
Illustration Award
Recommend this book:
When Love Rises
Michelle G Stradford
2019 Honorable Mention
169 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
When Love Rises by Michelle G Stradford is a contemporary poetry book which would appeal most to young adults and adults who love poetry as well as romance lovers. The book holds a diverse collection of contemporary poetry and reflections that explore the many different sides of love. The author explores themes like heartbreak, new love, and reliving past love. The book is split into three sections that divide the poems into the categories of love rising, in the dark, and the light. Are you ready for your very soul to be touched by the emotions these poems evoke during reading?
When Love Rises by Michelle G Stradford is a well-written poetry collection that I found myself getting wrapped up in very quickly. I really liked that the author did not force the poems to all be long poems, but rather wrote each poem to the perfect length for both the topic and the emotion that the poem was meant to express. So many authors ruin their poems by trying to force them to be longer than they should be so I was much relieved to find that was not the case with these masterpieces. My favorite poem in the book was “Summer”; the poem was so vivid that I could really picture it in my head and it felt like there could be a whole story behind the poem. Overall, this book took me on an emotional rollercoaster as each poem truly showed me a different side of love and each one was imbued with such emotion that I felt like I could connect to each poem on a personal level.
Recommend this book:
A Dime is a Sign
Poems of Love and Loss (Feelings Into Words)
Sherrill S Cannon
2019 Finalist
186 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Envelop yourself in the tenderly flowing words of romantic poetry in the unforgettably lyrical collection, A Dime Is A Sign: Poems of Love & Loss (Feelings Into Words) by Sherrill S. Cannon. Life is full of love and loss, but at times we experience our feelings and emotions so intensely, we can't put them into words. Allow the soft fluidity of the gentle poetry to caress your soul and bring comfort to your mind as you read through the sublime sonnets, poems, haiku, blank verse, and free-flowing verses. Each poem is meant to help convey a moment of deep emotion, and speak straight to the soul to help you better process each unique stage of love you experience. The delicately soothing words invite you to float lightly among the author's words and get lost in love.
A Dime Is A Sign: Poems of Love & Loss (Feelings Into Words) by Sherrill S. Cannon is a breathtaking book of romantic poetry. As a school teacher, wife of fifty-eight years, mother, and grandmother, Cannon has lived her words, writing them down throughout the years to help counsel teens and friends through love and heartache. Love and romance are beautiful, but loss can be tragically painful. We often ask ourselves, "Is it worth the pain to love?" The poems in this collection have answered with a resounding, "yes." The words moved me. Every word of every line held beauty and meaning. The poetry is based on the different stages of love -- from young, new love, to older forbidden love -- and the verses in this book were written to speak to both young teens and older adults.
Recommend this book:
On the Occasion of a Wedding
Eclectic Love Poems
Ollie Bowen
2019 Silver Medal
113 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
On the Occasion of a Wedding: Eclectic Love Poems by Ollie Bowen is a gorgeous collection of love poems and these poems are just awesome, a reflection of the beauty of love. And talking about love, the very first lines of the collection already give readers a taste of what to expect: “its sting / is what makes / it beautiful.” In this collection, readers experience different facets of love, its different expressions, and the emotions that fill the hearts of the personae as they celebrate a moment of love, capture a breath of it, or allow themselves to be transported.
Ollie Bowen’s poetry is designed for lovers; it celebrates the mystery of love, exploring the seasons of hearts that are aflame with love and conveying sentiments in a way that captures the human heart powerfully. The poems explore themes of carnal love, speaking about the “raw feeling of you” and also a love that is spiritual, when the heart looks heavenward, like a baby lifting its face towards a mother. The diction is celebratory, each poem a precious breath — short and succinct — capturing an emotion, a gorgeous thought, a longing, a fulfillment. On the Occasion of a Wedding: Eclectic Love Poems is a gift of love with lines to unwind by, thoughts to share with a loved one, and images that inspire. It is filled with religious symbolism and the exuberance of innocent love. Here is a collection that will thrill and inspire fans of poetry — no matter its kind!
Recommend this book:
Paper Heart
Jennifer LeBlanc
2019 Gold Medal
147 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Paper Heart is a collection of emotive poetry penned by Jennifer LeBlanc. Written in the most raw sense, the poems are largely only suitable for adult readers due to some graphic content, and the work spans a variety of emotions in the author’s life. Covering the full spectrum from hopeful moments of joy down to darker, more painful experiences, the volume contains more than eighty poems for its readers to consider. Most, like its title poem Paper Heart, are short considerations which capture a single moment; in this case an appreciation of beauty and fragility. Others, such as Be You, follow the acrostic method where each line begins with a letter from the title.
Poet Jennifer LeBlanc has a frank style in her free verse collection which is easy to read and absorb, making it ideal as a poetry volume of emotional outburst and exploration. One poem in particular which really spoke to me was Beautiful Boy, a consideration of regret and love that wasn’t meant to last, which used the bare minimum of words to create some really beautiful images of fragility and the healing, but also potentially destructive, power of love. LeBlanc gives a deceptively simple format a deeper level of excellence once her words hit you, and the book is beautifully formatted to complement the experience. Overall, Paper Heart will make a lot of sense to anyone who lives with their heart on their sleeve, and those in emotional distress are sure to find comfort and solidarity in Jennifer LeBlanc’s work.
Recommend this book:
Escape from Samsara
Poems
Vijay R. Nathan
2017 Honorable Mention
70 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Escape from Samsara by Vijay R. Nathan is a collection of poems that touch on several aspects of life including love, life, purpose, spirituality, and everything inbetween, intended to guide your soul to spiritual enlightenment. The pivotal aim of the collection is to enable your spiritual transformation so you can ascend above the materialism of modern day life, and free your mind. This way, you are ready to receive enlightenment so you can discover and achieve your purpose.
Vijay R. Nathan drew inspiration from everyday events, making the poems more relatable and easier to internalize. The unique and fresh style of poetry used will draw you in and urge you on, submerging your mind completely in the enchantment and thrill of the words. Each poem is unique in both wording and meaning, and together they blend into one to deliver a profound message to set you on your journey to achieving complete fulfillment through spiritual illumination. Through very simple words and an effortless style, Vijay R. Nathan delivered poems with a lot of depth and inspiration. There is always so much happening in our lives every day, and the hectic nature of this lifestyle can easily take over your entire life. Reading the poems in Escape from Samsara by Vijay R. Nathan gives your mind much-needed serenity, away from the demands of modern life, and sets you on the path to enlightenment and fulfillment. The poems will indulge your mind and push you to soar above the never-ending demands of a demanding lifestyle.
Recommend this book:
Poetry and Pearls
Romantic Poetry volume 1
N.R. Hart
2017 Gold Medal
238 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Poetry and Pearls is the first volume in a series of Romantic Poetry Collections by N.R. Hart, a heartwarming collection of poems that will delight readers, recalling some of the exquisite emotions and moments of love they have had. The poems are written to reflect the varying seasons of the year, but these seasons are symbolic of the “movements” and “moments” of the heart. Here are poems that explore romantic themes — intimacy, sensuality, giving, emotional freedom, pain and pleasure. Each poem is short, written on a symbolic image. At times they read like a statement, a sudden revelation caught in the hiatus of time.
I loved many of the poems and the way they capture the rich humanity of the poet. Here is one of my favorites:
“Our eyes recognized
each other
the very first time
as if holding secrets
for a thousand lifetimes.”
N.R. Hart is a poet who pays attention to the rhythm of the heart. She writes in the language of intimacy and uses a conversational tone in her poems that will absorb the reader and pull them in powerfully. This is a poet who can “carve” her “initials” into the hearts of her readers with the beauty of her words. The poems are highly emotional — each captures a moment, a gesture; a sign of life, of affection, of desire and longing. Poetry and Pearls is a gorgeous offering for readers who enjoy short poems loaded with insight and witticism. I found most of the poems very enjoyable and could read and feel my heart in most of the lines.
Recommend this book:
Markings in the Cave
Verse by Paul Tait
Paul Tait
2016 Finalist
80 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Markings in the Cave, a brilliant collection of short poems by Paul Tait, is a profoundly personal selection of one man’s musings – perhaps unheard by the silently attentive universe that he addresses. A theme emerges from these plaintive ruminations of the soul – an unusual, contrapuntal theme told in both harmonic and discordant tones – that seems to stress a tenuous but ever-present tension between the suffering in the world and the hope embedded in religion, with a frequent interjection and nod to the comforting distortion of personal spirituality.
These poems are concise and often highly structured, but like a waterfall over boulders they always flow. The verse often ranges from the subliminal to the sublime, evoking from the wreckage of an imperfect world the possibility of hope and sacred redemption, though always with a shred of doubt. Whether pondering the elusive state of marriage or the illusive promises of death, the poetry resonates with both raw and ethereal truths that are almost fully realized, but fortunately not quite.
Paul Tait has created from his musings in Markings in the Cave a perfect and exquisite minor gem on which to gaze and from which to reflect on one’s own fallible existence in this world. Have we been abandoned to our lowly selves by our Creator, leaving us with the question asked in I Need the Moon to Renew my Eyes: Or are all God’s given gifts/Interminable rifts/With the sovereignty of man? Must we despair, as offered in The Haunted Face of the Soul You Deserted: You are not prepared – you cannot divert it/The haunted face of the soul you deserted. Must we proclaim as one man does in Empty Net: Still, I can’t help needing/What I haven’t got.
The poet is not afraid to include a subtle rhyme or two to make his poetry sing, but every rhyme is situated perfectly within the rhythm of its verse, and these poems would be much the less without them. I feel very fortunate to have chanced upon this poetry.
Recommend this book:
Stardust and Fire
Tales of a Hopeful Romantic
Tracy A. Seiden
2016 Honorable Mention
92 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Tracy A. Seiden’s Stardust and Fire: Tales of a Hopeful Romantic comprises a collection of seventy-one poems about the many varying aspects of heterosexual love, passion, desire, attraction and romance. The first of the short pieces, "Childhood Forever," comes close to conventional rhyming poetry, but it is the only one that does. It serves almost as an introduction to the rest, which encompass the thoughts, dreams and longings of women of any age. These are all free verse: some divided into sections and others that Ms Seiden simply allows to flow.
Stardust and Fire: Tales of a Hopeful Romantic is a title that captured my imagination before I opened the book and read a single word. Tracy A. Seiden held my attention; every poem led me on to the next. “Dance” is so incredibly expressive it truly does dance, as do all the pieces involving dancing. In Divine Love, the woman encourages her man to be protective, and “fuels him to be the man he was meant to be.” "Peace of the Soul" echoes that theme. "Stardust" is thirty-eight flowing words, clever and utterly different. "Fire," the other title word, is best expressed in "Warrior on Fire." There is eroticism too in "Heaven’s Door," "Black Magic Symphony," and "Did He Feel It."
The surprise was "Dark Wings Broken." My personal favourite is "Don’t," a clever contradiction, or is it "A Winter’s Queen," or "Reflections" and “life is a cycle, never ending”? The contention for a favourite is powerful in Stardust and Fire, and Ms Seiden expresses herself as a “hopeful romantic” in every poem.
Recommend this book:
Angelica's Box
A Poetically Sober Psychotic Break, Pizzle's Trilogy of Insanity
Greatest Poet Alive
2016 Silver Medal
122 Pages
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Angelica's Box: A Poetically Sober Psychotic Break (Pizzle's Trilogy of Insanity) by Greatest Poet Alive is a book of poetry. This was a first for me as I normally do not read poetry books, but I wanted to try this. The poetry varies in that some poems are just a line or two and others are much longer. There were a lot of poems I could relate to and I found the writing to be beautiful. I found the humor to be very interesting and witty. Just after the Epilogue there was a little line that made me laugh a lot.
Angelica's Box: A Poetically Sober Psychotic Break (Pizzle's Trilogy of Insanity) by Greatest Poet Alive brings humor in a way I did not think was possible with poems. A few small drawbacks include the lack of capital letters at the start of some sentences and the amount of blank space on a lot of pages that I feel could have been filled with illustrations or maybe placing two smaller poems on the pages together. However, I really enjoyed the majority of the poems and it was a very fast read. I was able to fly through it in one sitting pretty quickly. I enjoyed the writing and it kept me interested throughout. I highly recommend this to lovers of poetry and people just starting to read poetry.
Recommend this book:
Strings of Milo
Estelle Roher
2015 Finalist
Kindle Edition
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Poetry - Love/Romance
Strings of Milo by Estelle Roher is a desperate and binding romance written in poetry instead of prose. It's full of the darkness and joy that real romance can bring to a person's life. Poetry really is unique in its ability to create a different impression on every reader. While I might have gotten the sense of desperation involved in love, that may have been entirely reflected from my own perspective of romance, brought out by Estelle Roher's vision and feel for the written word. Another reader could find a different meaning entirely, and I believe it's that ambiguity which is poetry's greatest strength, particularly in this case where it deals with emotions intrinsic to the very core of being human.
The writing style was interesting, and instead of sticking to one sort of poetry, you see the author explore her strengths and weaknesses as she moves from free verse to rhyming patterns. An interesting experience that allows you to explore what style you like the best in terms of poetic expression. Strings of Milo is a beautiful read. Even if you don't like poetry, I'd say give this one a shot. It's relatively short if you don't feel like reading a full 100 pages of poems, and yet it also speaks through poetry in an easily tangible way. You understand exactly what Estelle is trying to both spell out and imply by her writings. This allows for an easy grasp of the poems as well as an ease of reading.