The Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) and BiblioLabs at Lyrasis announce the winners of the 2026 Self-Publishing EBook Awards. Following the model of the current BCALA Literary Awards, the awards honor the best self-published eBooks in fiction and poetry by an African American author in the U.S. This is the eleventh time BCALA and BiblioLabs have given this innovative award. The recipients will receive their awards during the American Library Association Conference in Chicago, IL, in 2026.

FICTION

The fiction category winner is Silas Page by Author TARU.

Silas Page follows a boy born into tragedy after his sixteen-year-old mother dies moments after giving birth, leaving him to navigate a foster care system that repeatedly fails him. Moved through overcrowded group homes, corrupt caseworkers, and criminal influences, Silas is shaped by institutions that treat vulnerable children as disposable.

Rather than offering easy redemption, the novel confronts the lasting consequences of trauma, violence, and survival. Through Silas’s journey, the story examines the foster care pipeline and carceral system as interconnected structures that shape lives long before individual choices are made. Unflinching and deeply human, Silas Page asks what becomes of children society has already written off.

The honor book for Fiction is The Fourth Cross by Spike Adams.

Seventeen-year-old Tyrene Horn is accused after a school altercation leaves a police officer’s son critically injured. The evidence should matter. It does not. What matters are the people determined to make him pay: a veteran officer who wants revenge, another whose white supremacist beliefs shape every decision he makes, and a prosecutor who sees the case as a chance to settle old scores.

Inspired by real events, The Fourth Cross is Black literary fiction that examines racism, power, and the fragility of justice. It asks what happens when an entire system is invested in the wrong answer, and what it takes to keep fighting for the truth.

Spike Adams is a retired judge living in Aurora, Colorado. He published an award-winning young adult book titled The Mask.

POETRY

The poetry category winner is Life Is Just a Dream: A Book of Poetry by Lucky Goldie.

Life Is Just a Dream is a reflective and emotionally layered collection exploring identity, spirituality, survival, fatherhood, love, loss, and personal transformation through poetry. Rooted in the lived experiences of a Brooklyn-bred writer navigating adversity, healing, and self-discovery, the work examines how language can serve as both testimony and liberation.

Lucky Goldie is a multidisciplinary poet, author, performer, music producer, and creative director from Brooklyn, New York. His work has been recognized through the Poets House Exhibition Program, archived within the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture collections, and cataloged through the Library of Congress. Life Is Just a Dream serves as the opening foundation for his forthcoming literary body of work, The Golden Trilogy.

The honor award for Poetry goes to Behind Closed Words by Allen Strother.

In this debut collection, Allen Strother writes from the intersections of struggle, faith, loss, and redemption. Raised in Watts, California, his poems draw from a lifetime of experiences that have left their marks—moments of pain, perseverance, doubt, and spiritual awakening. The most memorable poems are not the loudest. They are the ones that sit with grief, wrestle with forgiveness, and search for meaning in the aftermath of life’s hardest lessons.

BCALA EBook Literary Awards Jury

• Members of the BCALA EBook Literary Awards Jury are:
• Tiffany A. Duck, LitDext LLC (Chair)
• Gladys Smiley Bell, Hampton University
• Annie Payton
• Eddie Hughes, Southern University
• Brenda Spencer Robertson, University of North Texas at Dallas
• Vanissa Ely, Southern University
• Monique Threatt, Indiana University