95th Annual California Book Awards
SUBMISSIONS OPEN
Books authored by residents of California and published during the 2025 calendar year may be submitted between August 1 and November 15, 2025.
Please use the following submission form: 2025 Submissions
After completing the form, please ship 6 copies of each submitted title to the address below. Books received without the submission form filled out will not be considered.
USPS
The Commonwealth Club
Attn: California Book Awards
110 The Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA 94105
UPS/FEDEX
The Commonwealth Club
Attn: California Book Awards
115 Steuart St
San Francisco, CA 94105
WE ACCEPT
- Books in the categories of Fiction, First Work of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Juvenile (to age 12), Young Adult, Californiana, and Contribution to Publishing
- Work must have been written by authors living in California at the time their work was published or submitted for publication.
- To be eligible for Californiana, the work must deal with a California-based issue, topic, or historical period.
- To be eligible for Contribution to Publishing, the publisher must be a California resident.
- To be eligible for Juvenile, the author must be a California resident. Illustrators can live out-of-state.
- To be eligible for First Work of Fiction, the work must be the author’s first fictional effort. Previously published short story collections will disqualify an author from the First Work of Fiction category; however, the author can still submit for the Fiction category.
- Short story collections and essays by the same author will be accepted for consideration under the Fiction category.
- If certain stories in the short story or essay collection have been published previously, the work may still be submitted for consideration. Eligibility is at the discretion of the jury.
WE DO NOT ACCEPT
- Self-published works
- Works from a publishing house that does not have some sort of vetting process
- E-books
- Guidebooks or manuals
- “As told to” books
- Anthologies from multiple authors
- Works by dual authors, unless both authors are California residents
- Translations of deceased authors or older works
- Reprints of books published in previous years
Please direct any questions regarding the Book Awards to: bookawards@commonwealthclub.org
Click to learn more about the awards
2024 94TH ANNUAL CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS WINNERS
CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS JURY
Christopher Chen is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (Bloomsbury, 2022), a book-length comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry.
Nicole Cooksey-Voytenko, a closet writer and avid reader, works as a substitute librarian for the San Francisco Public Library. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, two kids, and a cat.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a Ph.D. in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and now turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.
Roy Eisenhardt is a lecturer at UC Berkeley and USF Schools of Law. He is a former attorney, president of the Oakland Athletics and executive director of the California Academy of Sciences. (Nonfiction juror)
Peter Fish is a San Francisco-based writer, editor and teacher. For many years travel editor of Sunset magazine, he now writes regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle, Via, Coastal Living and other publications. In fall of 2018 he was Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University; he currently teaches travel and nature writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. His fiction has appeared most recently in The Sewanee Review.
Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of Conviction, a finalist for the Morris Award; Picture Us in the Light, a California Book Award winner and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist; and, most recently, When We Were Infinite. She writes and occasionally teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Gravity Goldberg is the director of public programs and visitor experience at The Contemporary Jewish Museum. She sits on the advisory board for the Litquake Literary Festival, and is the co-founder of Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco. She lives in San Francisco with her brilliant husband and fluff ball of a cat.
Mary Ellen Hannibal is a journalist and author, most recently of Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction. It received a Nautilus Book Award and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Gordon Jack is the author of two young adult novels, The Boomerang Effect (HarperTeen, 2016) and Your Own Worst Enemy (HarperTeen, 2018). When he’s not writing books, he’s recommending them as librarian at Los Altos High School, where he’s worked since 1995.
Nathalie Khankan is the author of Quiet Orient Riot, published by Omnidawn in 2020, recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. She was the founding director of the Danish House in Palestine and now teaches Arabic language and literature at UC Berkeley.
Maya Makker (she/her) grew up in the Central Valley and studied at UC Davis. She has worked as an educator in art, history, and science museums, and is passionate about telling diverse stories in our cultural institutions. Her love of books and collaborating with youth led her to 826 Valencia, where she now works as the communications manager.
Julia Flynn Siler is the author of two New York Times bestselling works of nonfiction, The House of Mondavi and Lost Kingdom. She is a former staff writer and longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Oxford Dictionary of Food and Wine, and other publications. She received a 2016–2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award to support her book The White Devil’s Daughter’s: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
Mary Taugher is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals in print and online, including Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Santa Monica Review, Notre Dame Review, Prime Number Magazine, and Coolest American Stories. She lives in San Francisco, where she is working on a short story collection.
Dora-Linda Wang, MD, MA, is an author, historian and psychiatrist. She received a 2025 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine, which states that her memoir, The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead Penguin Random House, 2010), calls for a renaissance of the noble profession of medicine as it devolves into a for-profit industry. Dora has also served as president of the American Psychiatric Association Caucus of Asian American Psychiatrists. She earned her MA in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Brazil, her family played founding roles in the Chinese-American community of the San Gabriel Valley.
THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS FOR YOUTH
Since 2020, The Commonwealth Club has partnered with the National Writing Project to bring the California Book Awards to youth. Each year, students are invited to read the finalists in the Juvenile and Young Adult Literature categories and publish their responses to a set of writing prompts online. Working with schools, libraries and other educational settings, the project supports young people’s literacy development by providing a safe and age-appropriate space for reading, writing, sharing and media creation.
