Writers, editors, publishers, and book lovers gathered at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake on Sunday to hear the announcements of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s (ACW’s) annual Adirondack Literary Award winners.

The Adirondack Literary Awards celebrate and acknowledge the books that were written by Adirondack authors or published in the region in the previous year.

All of the books submitted for consideration this year were on display, giving a visual sense of the scope of our Adirondack literary achievements, and many of the authors had signed copies of their books for sale.

This year a record 51 books were submitted, also, for the first time featured articles were accepted as a category. The winners are:

Best Children’s Book:  Lost by LeeAnne Baker.

This year there were two fiction prizes, one for best for short story collections and one for best novel. The award for Best Short Story Collection went to The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen, and the prize for Best Novel went to Jaime Sheffield for Here Be Monsters.

Best Memoir went to Wet Socks by Carol Gregson.

The Best Book of Edited Collections in Nonfiction went to North Country Reflections/Adirondack Reflections edited by Neal Burdick and Maurice Kenny.

The Best Book of General Nonfiction went to Out of the Blue; Blueline Essays 1979-1989 by Alice Wolf Gilborn.

The Best Book of Poetry went to Paul Pines for New Orleans Variations & Paris Ouroboros.

The Best Featured Article went to “A Phone Call and a Thank You Just in Time” by Chris Knight, published by the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

For the first time the People’s Choice Award was tied, winners were Never a Dull Moment; A Tapestry of Scenes & Stories from an Adirondack Medical Practice by Daniel Way, M.D.  and Race to Incarcerate by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer.

Judges for the Adirondack Literary Awards were:

Fiction:  Bibi Wein and Jerry McGovern

Nonfiction and memoir: Ellen Rocco and Joseph Bruchac

Poetry: Roger Mitchell and Stuart Bartow

Children’s Literature: Ellen Wilcox and Nancy Beattie

Featured Articles: Rick Brooks (from the Wall St Journal) and Michael Corkery (from the New York Times)

The Adirondack Center for Writing is a non-profit organization that supports the literary arts throughout the Park. They present workshops, writing and publishing conferences, and also organize public readings where they present both regional and nationally acclaimed authors. They’re supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts. Members provide a great deal of the operating budget through membership dues and contributions. Their office is in downtown Saranac Lake.

While it is a membership-based organization, all of the events, including workshops and conferences are open to the public. For more information, contact The Adirondack Center for Writing, Tel: (518) 354-1261, e-mail: acwevents@gmail.com; www.adirondackcenterforwriting.org.