Announcing our brilliant 2018 Award Winners

P R E S S R E L E A S E

April 19, 2019

NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS

Plus excerpts from the 2018 Special Honors Books!

Dear Friends of Nautilus,

We are honored and excited to announce an abundance of our excellent 2018 Nautilus Award-winning Better Books for a Better World!

First of all, we share gratitude to all the Authors and Publishers who have sent their entries this season to the Nautilus program, from around the world. We appreciate all you have done to write and produce these fine books and send them out into the world. You are an integral part of the fiery pulse that this program is radiating into the world, and we thank you.

It is with deep joy that we share brief excerpts from the five books that have garnered this year's Nautilus Special Honors. We then present to you the full list of Award Winners in all categories. May the messages of these books breathe outward through many readers and many lands!

NAUTILUS GRAND WINNER

Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times

Kate Davies, M.A., D.Phil.

New Society Publishers

GOLD in Personal Growth & Self Help: Large or Hybrid Publisher

Kate Davies is the recipient of the $2500 Nautilus Grand Prize Award to help further her important work in the world.

Kate Davies, MA, Phil, is emeritus faculty at Antioch University, senior fellow at the Whidbey Institute, and clinical associate professor in the University of Washington’s School of Public Health.

(p. 66)

[I]ntrinsic hope means staying positive about the global eco-social crisis. It means saying “YES!” to life and working with the situation. It means accepting what is happening but not seeing it as the only truth. Despite what’s happening, and because of it, we can be creative and innovative.

Using the present as a springboard, we can imagine a better world. Indeed, living courageously in these troubled times requires one of the largest leaps of imagination ever taken by our species. Not only must we have the courage to face our fears and anxieties, we must launch ourselves into a very uncertain future with all the faith and conviction we can muster.

Intrinsic hope understands that our state of mind doesn’t have to depend on whether our hopes are fulfilled or not. We can choose to be positive whatever happens. This is not about pretending that everything is OK and putting on a smiley face. It is about rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it. As educator, David Orr declared “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.” In this way, intrinsic hope is based on the conviction that we have enough and know enough to take action. Unlike extrinsic hope, it doesn’t dwell in the land of dissatisfaction, discontent, and inaction; it lives in the land of action, possibility, and potential.

At its core, intrinsic hope arises from a deep love of life. It is a warmth that wells up in our hearts and seeks expression in our actions. It’s about doing the right thing because we are loving, kind people and we want our actions to be loving and kind. Most importantly, this type of hope understands that the commonalities between people are greater than the differences.”

Highly recommended: Kate Davies has provided us a book to use as a catalyst to spark authentic conversation with family, friends and various community groups.

BEST OF SMALL PRESS

Stations Of the Cosmic Christ

Matthew Fox & Bishop Marc Andrus

with Artists M.C. Richards & Ullrrich Javier Lemus

Unity Books

GOLD in Religion/Spirituality of Western Thought

(p. 23)

“One way to understand the Cosmic Christ is to see in it an invitation to be our better —indeed our best —selves. (This parallels Buddhism, which sees Buddha nature within all of us, and the Jewish tradition, which sees the image of God in all beings.) We are on a journey to discover and give birth to the Christ in ourselves —the most loving, joyful, justice-committed, courageous, generous, caring, and compassionate parts of ourselves.

That is why the kind of practices we present here are so important. They are about renewing religion and spirituality from the inside out; from the individual back into new expressions of community and into our worlds of work, politics, education, economics, and the rest of society. Christ is in all of us: That is what the Cosmic Christ teaching is telling us. Christ is the best in all of us. The Buddha in us. The God self in us. The image of God in us. That which we emulate and desire to imitate. It is our imitation of God, imitation of Christ, 21st-century style.”

BEST OF SELF-PUBLISHED

Your Body is Your Brain

Amanda Blake

Trokay Press

SILVER in Social Science & Education

(p. 7)

“As you’ll discover in these pages, you have also embodied ways of experiencing emotions and relating to others. These embodied skills, habits and default behaviors affect how you go about pursuing your dreams, how you handle yourself in difficult situations, how you ask for help when you need it, how you move into conflict or avoid it, and so on. These ways of being are to a large extent learned, and to a much larger degree than you might expect, your body is involved in the learning. In the same way the skier embodies the ability to make the right move at the right moment, you embody certain behavioral and relational “moves.” Depending on how well-matched your embodied skills are to any given relationship terrain, you’ll either sail through beautifully, or crash and burn.

As I use the term “embodiment” throughout this book, it’s this phenomenon that I’m referring to: our extraordinary ability to put complex actions and interactions on autopilot, so that "what comes next” or “how to respond” becomes second nature. It makes no difference whether you are large or small, short or tall, graceful or awkward. I’m not talking about body image and beauty, or the body as an assemblage of medical parts, or the body as an athletic machine. I am talking about the body as a reflection of the person who lives within it.”

BEST OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Turtle Island: The Story of North America’s First People

Eldon Yellowhorn & Kathy Lowinger

Annick Press

GOLD in Middle Grade Non-Fiction

(p. 25)

“Imagine A Day in Your Life - 13,600 years ago

... Chores take up most of the day, but there is time for fun, too. You and your friends like to make yourselves look nice. Sometimes you make dyes from plants so you can tattoo beautiful patterns onto your friends’ skin. You make anklets and necklaces from shells to wear at special ceremonies. You enjoy singing and dancing together.

At the end of the day, you take shelter under the rocky overhang, and curl up side by side with your family. The dogs will bark a warning if any dangerous animals come near, and the fire will glow through the night. Beyond the overhang you can see a sliver of brilliant night sky. You listen to your grandmother tell stories about the stars and the moon until you fall asleep.

…The “tool kit” of Ice Age people —the ability to communicate, to make fire, to weave, to sew, to make stone and bone tools, to hunt and gather plants, and to domesticate dogs— helped them survive for thousands of years.”

LIFETIME CONTRIBUTION AWARD

MARY OLIVER

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Penguin Press

With profound gratitude for Mary Oliver’s eloquent, elegant poetic expression, that will forever touch into the very depth of our human heart, in rare relationship to the beautifully mysterious natural world in which we all live…

(p. 85)

MYSTERIES, YES

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

THIS LINK will download the pdf document listing all 2018 Nautilus Award Winners. We will send out another announcement during May, when the Nautilus website is fully updated with Bookcover images of all the new Award-winning titles. While reading and discussing these many books, plus all those others who arrived as Entries, we found ourselves many times saying ‘Look!’ and laughing in astonishment, and also, at times, bowing our heads.

With much gratitude and profound respect to you as Authors, Publishers, and their teams who have given us and all the world a sacred abundance of healing and wisdom and hope.

on behalf of the Nautilus reviewers, judges team, staff, & volunteers,

love and hugs,

Mary

Mary Belknap, PhD.

Director, Nautilus Book Awards

www.nautilusbookawards.com

[email protected]