2026 LITERARY AWARDS

2026 Awards Announcements

The Wisconsin Library Association (WLA) Literary Awards Committee is proud to honor the outstanding achievements of Wisconsin authors for works published in the previous year. These awards recognize excellence in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as notable contributions to the literary landscape.
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WLA Literary Award (Nonfiction)

This award is for the highest literary achievement by an author with a Wisconsin connection, for a work of nonfiction written in the previous year.

Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson

When Blankets first published in 2003, Craig Thompson's seminal memoir about first love and faith lost in rural Wisconsin debuted to rapturous acclaim. The winner of two Eisner and three Harvey Awards, it is to this day considered one of the all-time great works of graphic storytelling. Now, in Craig's long-awaited return to the autobiographical form, comes the story that Blankets left out.

Ginseng Roots follows Craig and his siblings, who spent the summers of their youth weeding and harvesting rows of coveted American ginseng on rural Wisconsin farms for one dollar an hour. In his trademark breathtaking pen-and-ink work, Craig interweaves this lost youth with the 300-year-old history of the global ginseng trade and the many lives it has tied together—from ginseng hunters in ancient China, to industrial farmers and migrant harvesters in the American Midwest, to his own family still grappling with the aftershocks of the bitter past.

Stretching from Marathon, Wisconsin, to Northeast China, Ginseng Roots charts the rise of industrial agriculture, the decline of American labor, and the search for a sense of home in a rapidly changing world.

 

WLA Literary Award (Fiction)

This award is for the highest literary achievement by an author with a Wisconsin connection, for a work of fiction written in the previous year.

 The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne

 Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.

 
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde's mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde's descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
 
Steeped in the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora, The Devil Three Times is a baptism by fire and water, heralding a new voice in American fiction.

 

 WLA Literary Award (Poetry)

This award is for the highest literary achievement by an author with a Wisconsin connection, for a work of poetry written in the previous year.

 Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson

 

 The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.

 

Notable Wisconsin Authors & Illustrators

Designed to promote greater awareness of the state’s literary heritage, the award recognizes an author’s entire body of work. This year’s Notable Authors are David Wroblewski and Hannah Morrissey.

David Wroblewski

 

Hannah Morrissey

 

 

Outstanding Achievement Awards 

These are Wisconsin authors recognized for outstanding achievement for books published in the previous year.

 

2026 Honored Fiction Authors

  • Everything We Could Do by David McGlynn
  • Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo

2026 Honored Nonfiction Titles

  • I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free by Lee Hawkins
  • Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire by Christine Wenc

2026 Honored Poetry Titles

  • Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenney