Congratulations to the following UNP authors who were finalists for the 2025 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards! “This year’s finalist judging process leaves us buoyant about the health of independent publishing,” says Executive Editor Matt Sutherland.

Winners in each genre, along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s Indie Publisher of the Year, will be announced in June 2026.

Adult Nonfiction

Art

Ketubah Renaissance: The Artful Modern Revival of the Jewish Marriage Contract by Michael Shapiro. Illuminating the contemporary revival of the Jewish marriage contract, Ketubah Renaissance relays the storied history of this beloved document (known in Hebrew as a ketubah) through the present day and showcases sixty of the most innovative and beautiful ketubot of the last half century.

Autobiography & Memoir

Scarlett: Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family by Leslie Stainton. A sixth-generation descendant of the Scarlett family of Georgia, Leslie Stainton grew up hearing about her heroic ancestors and their tragic plunge from wealth to poverty in the wake of the Civil War—and about the Scarlett O’Hara of novel and movie fame who made their name known. But when Stainton set out to learn the truth about her enslaving forebears, she discovered the lurid facts behind Gone with the Wind’s Lost Cause fantasy. If novelist Margaret Mitchell had chosen to tell the truth about an enslaving Scarlett, this is the story she might have written.

Ecology & Environment

The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart by Kathryn Wilder. Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this is a work of literary nonfiction that conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West.

Essays

Thank You for Staying with Me: Essays by Bailey Gaylin Moore. Urgent, meditative, and searching, Thank You for Staying with Me is a collection of essays that navigates the complexities of home, the vulnerability of being a woman, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks.

History

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle over Christianity in the Public Schools by Scott D. Seligman. Today’s battles over Christianity in U.S. public schools have deep roots. In the nineteenth century it was an intramural struggle between Protestants and later-arriving Catholics. But at Christmastime in 1905, when Frank Harding, the Presbyterian principal of a Brooklyn elementary school, urged his Jewish students to be more like Jesus, the Jewish community entered the fray in a big way.

Scarlett by Leslie Stainton is also a finalist in the History category.

General

Coffee Table Books

Ketubah Renaissance by Michael Shapiro is also a finalist in the Coffee Table Books category.

Congratulations to all the finalists!