Congratulations to the following Nebraska authors who were finalists for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards! More than 2,500 entries spread across 55 genres were submitted from University and independent publishers for consideration. The Finalists were determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners are now being decided by teams of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country.

Winners in each genre—along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s Independent Publisher of the Year—will be announced June 15, 2023.

Adult Nonfiction

Autobiography & Memoir:

If This Were Fiction by Jill Christman. If This Were Fiction is a love story—for Jill Christman’s long-ago fiancé, who died young in a car accident; for her children; for her husband, Mark; and ultimately, for herself. In this collection, Christman takes on the wide range of situations and landscapes she encountered on her journey from wild child through wounded teen to mother, teacher, writer, and wife.

Essays:

Animal Bodies by Suzanne Roberts. With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, the essays in Animal Bodies illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

History:

Baseball Rebels by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias. Baseball Rebels tells the stories of baseball’s reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America’s broader political and social protest movements, making the game—and society—better along the way.

Humor:

 The Great Indoorsman by Andrew Farkas. Farkas discovers that, just as the mannered and wonderfully (gloriously) artificial indoors influences us greatly, our lives are also controlled much more by fiction than by anything “real.” So come in out of the weather (it’s always terrible) and join the Great Indoorsman on his adventures, where he makes fun of pretty much everything, most of all himself.

Congratulations to all other finalists!