Washington State Book Awards

Beginning in 2000, the Washington Center for the Book at Seattle Public Library assumed administration of the Governor's Writers Award from the Washington State Library.  In 2001, the honor and ceremony were renamed the Washington State Book Awards. The list below contains each recipient, grouped by year, from 2000 until present day.  In 2017, Washington Center for the Book became a joint partnership of the Washington State Library and The Seattle Public Library. As of 2023 the Washington State Book Awards are a project of the Washington Center for the Book, an affiliate of The Library of Congress Center for the Book, administered by Washington State Library.

Many of the award winning titles are a part of the Pacific Northwest Collection and available for circulation.  Other titles may be located through OCLC WorldCat Services.

The recipients of the preceeding Governor's Writer Day Award are maintained in the Governor's Writers Award Collection and are available for review at the library's reading room in Tumwater, WA.  More information on that award can be found at the award history site.

For submission guidelines and to access the entry form for the current award season, please visit the Washington Center for the Book resource page.

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[1966-2000]  2001   2002   2003   2004   2005  

2006 - present can be viewed at Washington Center for the Book

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2001

• Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. By Michael Keith Honey
• Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers. By Andrew Ward
• Down in the Woods at Sleepytime. By Carole Lexa Schaefer
• Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. By Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov (translators)
• John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. By Trevor Fairbrother
• Mountain City. By Gregory Martin
• Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals. By David Laskin
• The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison. By Robert Ellis Gordon
• Treasures in Heaven. By Kathleen Alcala
• What the Ice Gets: Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916. By Melinda Mueller
• Mary Randlett, Photographer, Olympia. Nancy Pryor Blankenship Award**

 

2002

• Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems: 1951-2001. By Madeline DeFrees
• Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems, 1960-2000. By Carolyn Kizer
• Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret. By Duff Wilson
• Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey from America Into Her Indian Family's Past. By Mira Kamdar
• Northern Haida Master Carvers. By Robin K. Wright
• Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. By Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
• Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds: Notes from a Northwest Year. By Lyanda Lynn Haupt
• Swimming Toward the Ocean. By Carole Glickfeld
• The Keepers of Truth. By Michael Collins
• Whale Talk. By Chris Crutcher

 

2003

• Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back. By Pamela McClusky
• Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary. By Rebecca Brown
• Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art. By Deloris Tarzan Ament
• Perma Red. By Debra Magpie Earling
• Red Delta: Fighting for Life at the End of the Colorado River. By Charles Bergman
• The Gospel of Galore. By Tina Kelley
• The Restless Northwest. By Hill Williams
• The Twentieth Wife. By Indu Sundaresan
• Under the Quilt of Night. By Deborah Hopkinson
• Wonderful Tricks: Stories. By Gregory Spatz

 

2004

• Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America. By Linda Lawrence Hunt
• Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging. By Gary Atkins
• King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. By David Montgomery
• Range of Glaciers: The Exploration and Survey of the Northern Cascade Range. By Fred Beckey
• Rodzina. By Karen Cushman
• Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls. By Matt Ruff
• The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars. By Chris Forhan
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair. By Erik Larson
• The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. By Alan Gallay
• Visible Bones: Journey Across Time in the Columbia River Country. By Jack Nisbet

 

2005

• Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. By Nikhil Pal Singh
• Breaking Ground. By Paul Hunter
• Broken for You. By Stephanie Kallos
• Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. By Peter Ward
• Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother. By Lesley Hazleton
• Light's Ladder: Poems. By Christopher Howell
• Orphans. By Charles D'Ambrosio
• The Children's Blizzard. By David Laskin

Scandiuzzi Children's Book Award winners:

• Ella the Elegant Elephant. By Carmela D'Amico (author) and Steven D'Amico (illustrator)
• Honey, Baby, Sweetheart. By Deb Caletti