By Bev Rivero

Image credit: PDPics

Beacon has a lot of reasons to celebrate this spring! Several authors received awards recognition for their books, so let’s recap.

Last week, the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and Gayl Jones’s The Unicorn Woman was a finalist for Fiction in a livestreamed ceremony. Readers were quick to note that there were four finalists this year. As MJ Franklin notes in his New York Times review of The Unicorn Woman, “Part of the power of a Gayl Jones novel is the way she embroils her characters. They’re tangled in contentious relationships; they are frequently on the cusp of, or are responding to, terrible violence; whether they like it or not, they navigate their lives under the weight of history. They’re mired in the past and in the present, and that creates the stakes and the catharsis. Reading her books feels like walking through a minefield—we can see the decimated ground around us and we’re just waiting to see which step will set off the next explosion.”

We love regional awards, and two authors were acknowledged locally in April. Lisa Mueller won the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction for The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists, which Booklist called an “eye-opening work.” And Jaclyn Moyer’s On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California won the 2025 Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction from the Oregon Book Awards. If you’re in the area, you can attend a book talk at the Monmouth Public Library with the author later this month on May 28, 2025. And if not, read an excerpt from the book in MUTHA Magazine or check out this interview with Moyer on Oregon KATU-TV’s Afternoon Live.

This week, three of our titles were recognized as 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Winners and Finalists. Omo Moses’s The White Peril: A Family Memoir won in the Autobiography/Biography category. Paul Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US was selected as a finalist in the BIPOC category. And David Lester, Marcus Rediker, and Paul Buhle’s Revolution by Fire came in as a finalist for the graphic novel category.

Congratulations again to the authors, and if you add any of these to your TBR, let us know. Happy reading!

About the Author 

Bev Rivero is senior publicist at Beacon Press. Before joining Beacon in 2021, Bev was the communications and marketing manager at the National Book Foundation, where she worked on the National Book Awards, promoted the Foundation’s public and educational programs, and led all social media and marketing campaigns. Prior to NBF, she was in publicity at the New Press for six years, where she worked with authors committed to social justice, including Paul Butler, Michelle Alexander, and many more. She has extensive experience promoting nonfiction and tailoring outreach campaigns that resonate with activists and change-makers. Bev is a NYC-based graduate of Johns Hopkins University, ardent supporter of indie presses, and a graphic designer.