We’re thrilled to share the finalists for the twelfth annual Firecracker Awards, given for the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence.
The winners of this year’s Firecracker Awards will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony on June 25 at 6 p.m. ET. We hope you’ll join us!
Fiction
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Tin House | February 4, 2025
Distributor: Two Rivers
ISBN: 9781963108057
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, this novel “tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.”
Blood Work and Other Stories by Donald A. Carreira Ching
Bamboo Ridge Press | June 16, 2025
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 9781943756131
Set “against a backdrop of economic hardship, housing instability, cultural transition, and environmental loss,” the seventeen stories in this collection offer “a powerful and deeply intimate portrait of contemporary life in Hawai’i.”
Small Scale Sinners: Stories by Mahreen Sohail
A Public Space Books | September 16, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9798985976915
This debut collection includes twelve short stories “examining women’s lives in Pakistan and interrogating the burdens, and freedom, of love.”
There’s Nothing Left for You Here by Allegra Solomon
Four Way Books | March 15, 2025
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961897441
This debut collection of short fiction features stories “ranging in subject but joined by their keen attention to the lives of contemporary young women of color.”
Little F by Michelle Tea
Feminist Press | October 14, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781558613560
This novel “tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.”
Creative Nonfiction
How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir by Camille U. Adams
Restless Books | August 19, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-63206-395-3
“Mapping the fault lines between mother and child,” Adams’s memoir “weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.”
Bigger: Essays by Ren Cedar Fuller
Autumn House Press | October 7, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781637681084
This collection of essays “invites us to imagine a more generous way of being in the world, drawing on Fuller’s experiences as a daughter, sister, mother, teacher, and patient.”
Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir by Molly Gaudry
Rose Metal Press | November 4, 2025
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 9781941628379
In this blend of personal essays and fiction, Gaudry “asks: to what extent can fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction, and how can reading bring us back to who we want to be?”
Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore
Feminist Press | March 11, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781558613362
This memoir is “an expansive, darkly funny, and deeply personal reflection on the reality of living with—and dying from—metastatic breast cancer.”
Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed by Sangamithra Iyer
Milkweed Editions | November 4, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781571313935
This debut memoir is “a lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated.”
Poetry
The Choreic Period: Poems by Latif Askia Ba
Milkweed Editions | January 21, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781639551187
The Choreic Period: Poems is “a ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.”
13 Questions for the Next Economy: New & Selected Works by Susan Briante
Noemi Press | October 1, 2025
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 9781955992664
This collection, which weaves together selections from her four previous books with new poems and visuals, “charts interconnected constellations of economic and political systems that govern our lives.”
Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie
Carcanet Press | June 26, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781800174795
This debut collection, which moves from colonial to post-colonial Saint Lucia, features monologues, lyrics, and narrative poems that “enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.”
Seabeast by Rajiv Mohabir
Four Way Books | September 15, 2025
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961897489
In this poetry collection, Mohabir “winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species.”
Pastoral, 1994 by Joe Wilkins
River River Books | January 28, 2025
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 9798988137856
This poetry collection “calls compellingly into the lyric quietness, labor, and rituals of the rural West and its communities, bringing readers close to the earth.”
Magazines/Best Debut
By the WAYE
Elastic
Strange Hymnal
Tendrils
Zine Machine
Magazines/General Excellence
Foglifter
n+1
Orion
Oxford American
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative
