95th Annual California Book Awards FINALISTS
The jury for the California Book Awards has selected this year’s finalists for 2026. One of the oldest and most distinguished literary award programs in the nation has chosen 29 outstanding books in six categories. Gold and Silver Medal winners will be announced in June.
The 2026 nominees capture the wonder and brutality of our strange moment; across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, juvenile, and illustrated YA, the nominated books collectively point toward alternative futures or shape present-day questions. Readers of this year’s finalists can expect to encounter wit and humor in as much abundance as difficult historic interrogations. This year’s excellent nominees represent the complexity of California and deservedly capture our attention.
FICTION
Moderation by Elaine Castillo
Penguin Random House
Where You Are Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Penguin Press
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
Random House
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund
Astra Publishing House
Sacrament by Susan Straight
Counterpoint Press
FIRST FICTION
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan
Pantheon Books
My Train Leaves at Three by Nathalie Guerrero
One World
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh
Simon & Schuster
NONFICTION
A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis
by Jeanne Carstensen
Simon & Schuster
Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings by Myriam Gurba
Timber Press
Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
by Jeff Hobbs
Scribner
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World by Jordan Thomas
Riverhead Books
Rehab: An American Scandal by Shoshana Walter
Simon & Schuster
POETRY
S is For by William Archila
Black Lawrence Press
Strange Flowers by Bryan Byrdlong
YesYes Books
Green of All Heads by Aracelis Girmay
BOA Editions
Ars Poeticas by Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press
Fuel by Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books
YOUNG ADULT
Arm in Arm: The Grimke Sisters' Fight for Abolition and Women's Rights by Angelica Shirley Carpenter
Lerner Publishing Group
Trans History: From Ancient Times to the Present Day by Alex L Combs and Andrew Eakett
Candlewick Press
Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout
MacMillan Children's Publishing Group
I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This by Eugene Yelchin
Candlewick Press
All the Tomorrow's After by Joanne Yi
Simon & Schuster
JUVENILE
Dreams to Ashes: The 1871 Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre by Livia Blackburn
Lerner Publishing Group
Stalactite and Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave by Drew Breckmeyer
Simon & Schuster
Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe
Simon & Schuster
The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest by Aubrey Hartman
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
The History of We by Nicholas Smith
Penguin Young Readers
Outsider Kids by Betty Tang
Scholastic
Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers. Eligible books must be written while the author is a resident in California and must be published during the year under consideration.
Books published in 2026 may be submitted starting in September.
Click to learn more about the awards
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.
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale, 2024) and the translator of The Hell of That Star (Wesleyan, 2026) by Kim Hyesoon. A former high school physics teacher, Ok is now an assistant professor in the UC Davis MFA.
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.
