A full High Five to celebrate!

A full High Five to celebrate!  Five book award competitions have chosen my book The Telling Image Shapes of Changing Times. It won Grand Prize Best Nonfiction 2019 from Next Gen Indie Book Awards, where it was recognized with a ceremony in Washington, D.C. during the American Library Association Convention. It was selected for the  Nautilus Book Award, which honors better books for a better world. The National Indie Excellence Award and the Independent Press Award also chose it as their winner. News of my fifth book award was just received from NYC Big Book Award, which selects for great ideas from around the globe. The Telling Image took home awards in three categories: Photography, Coffee Table Book, and Book Interior Design Nonfiction.

It is gratifying that ideas that sleep in my mind awaken in books that reach other minds. It is thrilling when my book is honored for its writing, photographs, design, cover, and quality. Writers write in isolation, not knowing if the words will land with welcome by readers. When awards are received, it lets the writer know that an invisible full circle has occurred - that an unknown reader and an unknown judge have sent their nod that an idea transferred from my mind to theirs. It is a sacred circle. 

The Telling Image Wins Independent Press Award

A happy surprise.

My book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times, just won its fourth book award from Independent Press Awards, an international competition.

This comes on top of being named Grand Prize Winner for Best Nonfiction 2019 from Next Gen Indie Book Awards, a Gold from Nautilus Book Awards, and an Indie Excellence Award. This book was 25 years in the making, so the satisfaction that it was understood and appreciated is immense. Enjoy shape-seeking.

A Third Win for The Telling Image

The National Indie Excellence Awards emphasize a synergy of form and content in judging their award winners. My book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times delivers its message through its 200 images, as much as its text delivers its ideas - a synergy of form and content. So I was thrilled to be selected for its Excellence Award for both Arts and Entertainment as well as Cover Design.

As a former documentary filmmaker for NBC News, I had to find a telling image that conveyed the essence of the information that I scripted. In covering foreign cultures or national issues, I realized how important shape is in downloading the world into order and meaning. Shape itself can be a symbol that tells us the thinking, the mental map, of the culture that built a circular settlement, a pyramid, a town square, a roundabout or a downtown grid. These very shapes reflect whether a society is based on equality or hierarchy, on qualities or quantities, on flow or fixed places.

National awards for Indie books are especially welcomed as independent publishing, from university presses to hybrid publishing, are rising dramatically while traditional publishers are merging and shrinking. The more ideas that are shared, the stronger the society. Thanks to awards such as this, merit can still be recognized even within a system where all can enter. I am grateful to the National Indie Excellence Award judges for the difference their recognition makes for independent writers and excited to be recognized for excellence.

The Telling Image is a Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner

The Telling Image is a winner of the Nautilus Book Awards!

The idea for a book often aligns with a point in time, a story or observation that inspired it. Yet the process of writing a book is more porous than simply a beginning and an end. The Telling Image brewed in me for decades before its publication. After the physical book was in stores and at conferences and in the hands of readers, it still was not in its final stage. The book is simply the suitcase of the multiple ideas that are enclosed. And those ideas embed uniquely in each reader. So a book begins, not ends, at publication. It is never ‘finished’, as its ideas have thousands of carriers in those who read the book.

I was deeply gratified that my book was recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards with a Gold Award for The Creative Process. This felt particularly wonderful to me, as it was a long and meandering thought process that led it from field to field until I found an encompassing way to speak of many things – how we see, how we think, organize, find pattern and meaning – and how the very answers to these questions shift at major transition points in history.

The Nautilus Awards recognize books in many genres that nurture positive change. It aims for Better Books for a Better world. And it combs the world to find the ideas bubbling in all categories, from 36 states and a dozen other nations. We need this kind of harvester in our world. One that looks for the best expression of our highest aims.

Writing is a solitary process. It often feels like a spider throwing out its silk thread without knowing whether it will reach and attach to any destination. It is an act of faith. So it is with great gratitude to Nautilus Book Awards that I can smile knowing that the thread of ideas I flung out to the world was so graciously received.