Uncommon Strangers has been selected to receive the International Impact Book Award for literary fiction, with the distinction of Distinguished Author.
"Following a thorough review of your work against our Standard of Excellence, our panel has selected you as a Distinguished Author of the International Impact Book Awards for your book, Uncommon Strangers. This distinction is conferred upon a limited number of authors, leaders, and voices whose work demonstrates genuine, measurable impact on the readers and communities they serve. Your work reflected precisely the caliber this honor was created to recognize. To be recognized as a Distinguished Author is to be positioned among a global community of authors whose words carry weight and whose ideas leave a lasting mark. This recognition is not given lightly. It is earned on the strength of what you created and it now belongs to you. It is a mark of distinction you carry into every room, every stage, and every conversation that follows."
A Word About Independent Press Awards
For those unfamiliar with the landscape of independent publishing, it is worth saying plainly: this is about as good as it gets for independent press awards. The traditional publishing world has its own infrastructure of recognition — the major prizes, the review outlets, the institutional gatekeepers. Independent authors work outside that infrastructure, and the awards that exist within the independent press world vary enormously in their rigor and their meaning. The International Impact Book Awards is among the most serious of them. Their standard of excellence is not a formality. The panel reviews work carefully, and the Distinguished Author distinction is not given broadly.
On Uncommon Strangers
Uncommon Strangers began, as many books do, with a question I could not stop asking. What does it mean to trust someone you have no reason to trust? What does it mean to love without condition — not as a sentiment, but as a practice, a discipline, a choice made again and again in the face of uncertainty? The book explores those questions through characters who find themselves bound together by circumstance, by need, and eventually by something that looks very much like grace. It is, at its heart, a story about what we owe each other and what we discover when we give more than we thought we had.
To every reader who picked up Uncommon Strangers, who wrote a review, who passed it to a friend, who told me what it meant to them — this belongs to you too. Books do not have impact in isolation. They have impact because readers bring them to life. Thank you for that.