This year was another exciting year for independent literary publishing! We’re proud to share this list of CLMP member publishers’ books honored by major literary awards in 2025.
Fiction
Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento
University of Pittsburgh Press | October 8, 2024
Distributor: Longleaf Services
ISBN: 9780822948360
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Fiction
The short stories in this collection “expertly capture the complications of queerness, family, dislocation, and culture.”
The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press | March 19, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781954404236
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
In these novellas, Arad “probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.”
Creative Nonfiction
Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson
Fonograf Editions | November 5, 2024
Distributor: NYU Press
ISBN: 9798987589076
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
This essay collection “pays a finely hewn attention to that which our wasteful, capitalistic society discards.”
Poetry
Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi
Wave Books | April 2, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781950268931
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This poetry collection explores “memory, loss, and grief inside the system of capitalist nation-states.”
Rara Avis by Blas Falconer
Four Way Books | August 15, 2024
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961897021
Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2025 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Rara Avis “captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional.”
Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson
Graywolf Press | October 1, 2024
Distributor: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Macmillan
ISBN: 9781644453094
Winner of the 2025 Four Quartets Prize
In this collection, Gibson “explores the strangeness of the everyday with fresh urgency, inviting us to reawaken and reclaim our fuller selves.”
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass
Perugia Press | September 24, 2024
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9780997807684
Winner of the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry
This debut poetry collection “is part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience.”
Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington
BOA Editions | October 15, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781960145314
Winner of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry
The poems in this collection “investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781948579247
Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
The poems in this collection “study the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
Watchnight by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
Nightboat Books | September 4, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781643621944
Winner of the Kenny Fries Disabled Writer Literary Award
Watchnight is a “psychedelic quest” of a poetry collection “marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making.”
![[...]](https://www.clmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/unnamed-file-211x300.png)
[…] by Fady Joudah
Milkweed Editions | March 5, 2024
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781639551286
Winner of a 2025 American Book Award
Joudah’s sixth poetry collection “speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.”
Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski
Noemi Press | March 15, 2024
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 9781955992046
Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
Girl Work “centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender-nonconforming self in our current political moment.”
To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Archipelago Press | January 9, 2024
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781953861726
Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
This poetry collection “follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair.”
Into the Hush by Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press | April 1, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781556597145
By the 25th US Poet Laureate
Sze’s twelfth poetry collection “explores the exigencies of climate change, of endangered cultures, and of our nuclear age.”
Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm
Milkweed Editions | March 14, 2023
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781639551019
Winner of the National Book Award in Science and Literature
“Part requiem, part bedtime story,” Meltwater “narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it.”
