2025 NC Book Awards (All Titles)

RALEIGH

North Carolina’s strong literary tradition is celebrated by the 2025 North Carolina Book Awards, which will be presented Dec. 5 during the annual meeting of the N.C. Literary and Historical Association at 109 E. Jones St., Raleigh, NC, in the ground floor auditorium. The awards ceremony begins at 1 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The annual awards recognize significant works by North Carolina writers.

Kathleen DuVal, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” (UNC Press, 2024), will give the W. Keats and Elizabeth Sparrow Keynote Address at the ceremony.

Since its founding in September 1900, the N.C. Literary and Historical Association has pledged to stimulate the production of literature and to collect and preserve historical material in North Carolina.

Read the full press release here.

The 2025 North Carolina Book Award winners are:

Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction: Katherine Scott Crawford for The Miniaturist’s Assistant. Crawford is an award-winning novelist whose historical fiction is steeped in a vivid sense of place. An 11th-generation Southerner born and raised in South Carolina, she spent 13 years as a college English professor and later wrote as a columnist for The Greenville News (SC) and the Asheville Citizen-Times (NC), exploring the outdoors, parenting, books, and Southern life. A former backpacking guide and “recovering academic,” Crawford, who previously published Keowee Valley, believes historical fiction is the best way to time travel. Her stories explore how time is porous and what it means to be fully human—no matter the century. She lives with her family in the North Carolina mountains.

Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction: Rob Christensen for Southern News, Southern Politics: How a Newspaper Defined a State for a Century. Christensen, former long-time chief political reporter at the Raleigh News & Observer explores the powerful connection between the N&O and North Carolina’s political landscape. Discover the N&O’s role in shaping the state, the Daniels family dynasty, and how the paper helped define the power of the press in Southern politics.

Roanoke Chowan Award for Poetry: Crystal Simone Smith for Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound. Smith is an award-winning poet, indie publisher, and educator. Smith’s work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, POETRY Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. A recipient of Duke University’s Humanities Unbounded Fellowship, she writes poetry about the human condition and social change. Smith is the founder and managing editor of Backbone Press and serves on the editorial board of Juxtaposition: The Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship and The Heron’s Nest.

NC AAUW Young People’s Literature Awards: Carol Baldwin for Half Truths in YA literature and Patrice Gopo for Ripening Time in Children’s Literature. Baldwin, an SCBWI member for over 25 years, published her first YA historical novel. Gopo, an award-winning writer whose work explores themes of place, belonging, and home, lives with her family in North Carolina.

For the other NCLHA Achievement Awards, click here.