Nominations are underway for the 14th annual High Plains Book Awards. These awards recognize the best fiction, photography, Indigenous writers and other literary works coming out of Montana, Wyoming and six other regional states as well as three Canadian provinces.
Before a nominee can win, he or she needs to win the heart and mind of a key book demographic: community readers, who screen each of the hundreds of nominations.
Shortly after the nominations close on March 13 the integral work of the community readers begins. It’s Mary Uecker’s job as lead reader wrangler to find them and put them to work.
"They are given a select bag of books that were randomly selected and put into a bag. At the end of the reading period which is usually May 15, the books are returned to the library with the evaluation filled out for each book," Uecker said.
The number of readers Uecker needs is determined by the number of nominations.
"For example poetry had 21 books. We needed 21 readers and each reader would read anywhere from three to five books," Uecker said.
With 12 categories of books, that’s a lot of community readers.
When their work is done, their evaluations are tabulated and the top three books in each category become finalists.
The finalists books go to a panel of judges says Becky Weihe, a High Plains Book Awards board member.
"And those judges are people who have been authors in the book awards prior. And so they then read the three finalists’ books, and there are several judges, that read the finalists’ books and then pick the winner," Weihe said.
The top names of the finalists in each category will be released in June. The winners are announced at the awards banquet held in Sept. 26 in Billings in conjunction with the High Plains Book Fest which will take place Sept. 24-26 in Billings.
The High Plains Book Awards were established in 2006 to recognize regional authors and literary works that examine and reflect life in Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
