Connecticut Book Awards Presented to Local Authors

The Connecticut Center for the Book has announced the 2021 Connecticut Book Awards Winners, recognizing the best books of 2020 which are either about Connecticut or by authors and illustrators from Connecticut in multiple categories. The mission of the Connecticut Center for the Book is to promote the written and spoken word throughout the state, and to foster a love of reading for the people of Connecticut.

The categories include Poetry, Books for Young Readers, Nonfiction, and Fiction. Awards also include a special category called the Bruce Fraser “Spirit of Connecticut” award. This award is in memory of longtime Connecticut Humanities director Bruce Fraser and celebrates Connecticut’s sense of place. Fraser was director of Connecticut Humanities for 28 years, and a proponent of Connecticut’s sense of place. He was interested in how places evoke memory and emotions from people, how people have such ferocious identification and loyalty to their surroundings and how the very landscape influences people.

To be eligible for the Connecticut Book Awards, authors and illustrators must currently reside in Connecticut and must have lived in the state at least three consecutive years or have been born in the state. Alternatively, the work may be substantially set in Connecticut.

This year’s winners and honorable mentions are as follows:

NONFICTION
The Alchemy of Us | Ainissa Ramirez | New Haven

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience.

FICTION
Musical Chairs | Amy Poeppel | Kent

Musical Chairs has been described as “a hilarious and heartfelt new novel about a perfectly imperfect summer of love, secrets, and second chances.” A New York Times review said “In this funny, profound, and brilliantly alive novel about all the messy, wise, and wonderful chords that love can strike in our lives, Poeppel gathers together fathers and daughters, old flames and new sparks, music, writing and gardening, to explore what it really means to feel at home, and how life can open you up in ways you never saw coming.”

POETRY
My Husband Would | Benjamin S. Grossberg | West Hartford

Set at the crossroads of middle age, this book investigates love and family—both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves. Funny, cinematic, and inventive, the poems recount family lore—a mother’s options, the clouded circumstances of a distant marriage—side by side with the perplexities of contemporary romance.