As Kimberly mentioned last week, both of us are back on this year’s Cybils Awards committees. After doing the YA fiction panel for two years back-to-back, I needed some time off to recover from all of that reading. I decided instead of going for fiction this year, though, I wanted to try my hand at middle grade and young adult non-fiction. While I don’t read or review as much work in those categories as I do YA fiction, my background in writing non-fiction, as well as my extensive reading in adult non-fiction makes me feel like it’s an area I should spend some more time in. I want to write more about this growing area in YA and be able to talk more about it because of having read quite a bit. Upper middle grade non-fiction is a bonus to this reading, as it will be an awesome way to rework some of my thinking and approach to reading. I’m excited!

Because non-fiction isn’t an area we write about a whole lot, I thought I’d do like Kim and offer up a big list of titles you could nominate for my category. I’m pretty sure these are all eligible as either upper middle grade (5-8th grade publication age range) or YA, but do double check when you nominate that they are; I’ve gone by Amazon standards, which I believe is what Cybils organizers use. This post is going up Monday, and award nominations open on Saturday, so the chances of some of these titles already being nominated is pretty good.

But that’s why it’s such a huge list! I’ll absolutely be missing titles, so feel free to note others or nominate others that have been published between October 16, 2015 and October 15, 2016. I discovered while trying to compile this list that finding good resources for recent and forthcoming non-fiction is difficult. I put myself in the category of being bad about keeping up with it, but I’m determined now to be much better about it, knowing that the information is really hard to come by. If you know of sold resources outside of searching Edelweiss or Kirkus reviews, do let me know. My standbys for fiction don’t seem to offer the same depth for nonfiction.

I haven’t forgotten about the monthly debut round-up I do, so keep an eye out for that to tackle more than one month in my next post. I wanted to hop on the Cybils train first to ensure that there’s a huge selection of books for me to read over the next three months.

All of the information for how to nominate books for the Cybils — and again, anyone can nominate — is up on their website. Seriously: give Kimberly and I piles of books to read and write about. Or, well, give them to me, as Kim’s work will be much more secretive in the second round for graphic novels than mine will be in the first. Links on the titles below go to their Goodreads pages.

• America’s Tea Parties: Not One, But Four! by Marissa Moss (MG)
• Being Jazz: My Life As A (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings (YA)
• Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights by Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace (YA)
• The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and The Trial of the Century by Sarah MilleR (YA)
• The Boy Who Became Buffalo Bill: Growing Up Billy Cody in Bleeding Kansas by Andrea Warren (MG)
• Breakthrough!: How Three People Saved “Blue Babies” and Changed Medicine Forever by Jim Murphy (MG)
• Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America by Gail Jarrow (MG)
• Clarina Nichols: Crusader for Women’s Rights Diane Eickhoff (YA)
• Courageous Women of the Civil War by MR Cordell (YA)
• The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande (YA)
• The Ebola Epidemic: The Fight, The Future by Connie Goldsmith (YA)
• Eureka!: 50 Scientists Who Shaped Human History by John Grant (YA)
• Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee (YA)
• Extreme Battlefields: When War Meets The Forces of Nature by Tanya Lloyd Kyi (MG)
• The Extraordinary Suzy Wright: A Colonial Woman on the Frontier by Teri Kanefield (MG)
• Fantastic Fugitives: Criminals, Cutthroats, and Rebels Who Changed History by Brianna DuMont (MG)
• Fashion Rebels: Style Icons Who Changed The World Through Fashion by Carlyn Cerniglia Beccia (MG)
• Feminism: Reinventing the F Word by Nadia Abushanab Higgins (YA)
• Fight Like A Girl by Laura Barcella (YA)
• Fight to Learn: The Struggle to Go to School by Laura Scandiffio (MG)
• Floodwater and Flames: The 1913 Disaster in Dayton, Ohio by Lois Miner Huey (MG)
• A Girl Called Vincent: The Life of Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Krystyna Poray Goddu (YA)
• The Great White Shark Scientist by Sy Montgomery (MG)
• The Gutsy Girl by Caroline Paul (MG)
• Hillary Clinton: American Woman of the World by Cheryl Harness (MG)
• In The Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives by Kenneth C. Davis (YA)
• Irena’s Children by Tilar Mazzeo (MG)
• It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Past, The Present, and The Future of Global Warming by Bridget Heos (YA)
• The Jerrie Mock Story: The First Woman to Fly Solo Around The World by Nancy Roe Pimm (MG)
• Just My Type: Understanding Personality Profiles by Michael J. Rosen (MG)
• Last of the Giants: The Rise and Fall of Earth’s Most Dominent Species by Jeff Campbell (YA)
• Let Your Voice Be Heard: The Life and Times of Pete Seeger by Anita Silvey (MG)
• LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality by Kirstin Cronn-Mills (YA)
• March of the Suffragettes by Zachary Michael Jack (YA)
• Marooned in the Arctic by Peggy Caravantes (YA)
• Mercy: The Incredible Story of Henry Bergh, Founder of ASPCA and Friend to Animals by Nancy Furstinger (MG)
• Misunderstood: A Book About Rats by Rachel Toor (YA)
• Next Round: A Young Athlete’s Journey to Gold by John Spray (YA)
• Our Moon: New Discoveries About Earth’s Closest Companion by Elaine Scott (MG)
• Plants vs. Meats: The Health, History, and Ethics of What We Eat by Meredith Hughes (YA)
• The Plot to Kill Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Unlikely Hero by Patricia McCormick (YA)
• Presenting Buffalo Bill: The Man Who Invented The Wild West by Candace Flemming (MG)
• Pride: Celebrating Diversity and Community by Robin Stevenson (MG)
• Quiet Power by Susan Cain (YA)
• Rad Women Worldwide by Kate Schatz (MG)
• Radioactive!: How Irene Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed The World by Winifred Conkling (YA)
• Sabotage: The Mission to Destroy Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb
• Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story by Caren Stelson (MG)
• Samurai Rising by Pamela S. Turner (MG)
• Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs Joel Meyerowitz (MG)
• Sitting Bull: Lakota Warrior and Defender of His People by SD Nelson (MG)
• The Slowest Book Ever by April Pulley Sayre (MG)
• Sondheim: The Man Who Changed Music by Susan Goldman Rubin (YA)
• Space Junk: The Dangers of Polluting Earth’s Orbit by Karen Romano Young (MG)
• Speak Up: A Guide to Having Your Say and Speaking Your Mind by Halley Bondy (MG)
• A Storm Too Soon: A Remarkable True Survival Story in 80-Foot Seas by Michael Tougias (MG)
• The Story of Seeds by Nancy Castaldo (YA)
• Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter Nelly Bly by Deborah Noyes (MG)
• This Land Is Our Land: A History of American Immigration by Linda Barrett Osborne (MG)
• Urban Tribes: Native Americans in The City by Lisa Charleyboy and Mary Beth Leatherdale (YA)
• Ugly by Robert Hoge (MG)
• UnSlut by Emily Lindon (YA)
• The V-Word edited by Amber J. Keyser (note: since my own writing is included in this collection, I will be 100% sitting out any discussion or reading of the title)
• Vietnam: A History of the War by Russell Freedman (MG)
• We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman (MG)
• A Weird and Wild Beauty: The Story of Yellowstone, America’s First National Park by Erin Peabody (MG)
• You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen by Carole and Jeffery Boston Weatherford (MG)
• You Got This: Unleash Your Awesomeness, Find Your Path, and Change Your World by Maya Penn (MG)