Meet the 2025 BPL Book Prize Finalists, Mosab Abu Toha, Gina María Balibrera, Alice Driver, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emet North, Helen Phillips
Join us for our annual BPL Book Prize Shortlist Reading & Panel, featuring the shortlisted authors for 2025 BPL Book Prize.
Fiction shortlist:
The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera
Hum by Helen Phillips
In Universes by Emet North
Nonfiction/poetry shortlist:
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha
Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company by Alice Driver
Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Each fall, BPL honors outstanding works of nonfiction/poetry and fiction. Selected by librarians and staff, who draw on their broad knowledge of literature and the many populations they serve, the BPL Book Prize recognizes writing that captures the spirit of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize was established in 2015 by the Brooklyn Eagles, young, engaged Brooklynites who are passionate about the library and work to engage new patrons.
This talk will feature the 2025 shortlist nominees in conversation with Jessica Harwick, prize judge and BPL librarian. On Sunday, Sept 21, the winners will take part in a panel in conversation with one another and a Brooklyn author at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Past winners include Kaveh Akbar, Blair L.M. Kelley, Catherine Lacey, Lamya H, Xochitl Gonzalez, and Threa Almontaser.
This is an official 2025 Brooklyn Book festival Bookend event.
PARTICIPANTS
GINA MARÍA BALIBRERA earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She’s been awarded grants from Aspen Words, Tin House, the Rackham Foundation, and the Periplus Collective, as well as a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, and the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship.
HELEN PHILLIPS is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children. Find her online at HelenCPhillips.com or on X @HelenCPhillips.
EMET NORTH has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, led wine tastings, waited tables, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They translate from Spanish to English with a particular focus on queer and trans voices and are always looking for new projects. https://www.emetnorth.com/
MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award, a James Beard Award and a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for his essays on Gaza in The New Yorker.
Alice Driver is a James Beard Award-winning investigative journalist and public speaker from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company. In 2024, the book won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. In 2026, the book will be published in Italian by Ferrobedò. In her work and writing, Driver focuses on the American food system, immigration, and unjust labor practices. Driver is also the author of More or Less Dead and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez. Driver recently interviewed poet Homer Aridjis and authors Mario Bellatin and Elena Poniatowska in Mexico City for the Library of Congress PALABRA archive. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she is a Journalist in Residence at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, part of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
DR. ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is also the author of four earlier books aka portable textual ceremonies, including Undrowned which won the 2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina. www.alexispauline.com
