This is your semi-regular roundup of new and recent awards earned by Texas writers and books.

2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced Cynthia Leitich Smith as the winner of the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. Leitich Smith lives in Austin, Texas, and is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation. Awarded in alternating years with the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the biennial NSK Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the world of children’s and young adult literature. The next lit fest will be given in Leitich Smith’s honor in the fall of 2021.

CWA Dagger Awards 2020 Winners

Lou Berney has won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller for November Road, a poignant crime novel set against the assassination of JFK. The novel attracted widespread acclaim from reviewers and fellow authors alike, with Stephen King declaring it “exceptional”. Berney has previously won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Oklahoma Book awards. Berney was also Highly Commended in the CWA Gold Dagger category.

Tomás Rivera Children’s Book Award

The recipients of Texas State University’s Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award for works published in 2018-2019 are Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña, for My Papi Has a Motorcycle.

Goddard Riverside Announces Social Justice Book Prize

For Beautiful Black Boys Who Believe in a Better World, by author Michael W. Waters and illustrator Keisha Morris, has won the first-ever Goddard Riverside CBC Youth Book Prize for Social Justice.

Sara A. Whaley Book Prize

Texas Woman’s University associate professor of Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, Ph.D., is the recipient of a 2020 National Women's Studies Association's (NWSA) Sara A. Whaley Book Prize. Phillips-Cunningham’s book, Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers, is a comparative racial history of Irish immigrant and southern Black women who labored as domestic workers in northeastern U.S. cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sara A. Whaley Book Prize is awarded for groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant feminist contributions to the topic of women and labor.

2020 National Outdoor Book Award

Secrets of Snakes: The Science beyond the Myths by David A. Steen, published by Texas A&M University Press, has won the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA) in the Nature and the Environment category. NOBA is a non-profit educational program and the outdoor world’s largest and most prestigious book award program.