2025 Lincoln Award List

Feeling blocked after moving from Argentina to New Jersey, a sixteen-year-old poet finds herself torn between a cute American boy in her math class and a Greek student who understands the struggles she is facing in an ESL class. Sixteen-year-old Ana is a poet and a lover of language. Except that since she moved to New Jersey from Argentina, she can barely find the words to express how she feels. At first Ana just wants to return home. Then she meets...

"Sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there's more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school--whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don't know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn't recognize. To the...

Nineteen-year-old orphan Signa Farrow confronts Death--and her own deathly powers--when she investigates the mysterious murder of a relative at the Thorn Grove estate.

While recovering from a game-related concussion, football star Isaiah wonders what his life would be like without the game.

Shiori, princess of Kiata, has a secret: Forbidden magic runs through her veins. On the morning of her betrothal ceremony she loses control, and it forestalls the wedding she never wanted-- but it also catches the attention of Raikama, her stepmother. Using a dark magic of her own, Raikama banishes the princess, turns her brothers into cranes, and warns Shiori that with every word that escapes her lips, one of her brothers will die. Peniless, voiceless,...

"When self-proclaimed 'not very bright' nineteen-year-old Danyal Jilani is chosen for a prestigious academic contest, he hopes to impress a potential arranged marriage match, only to begin falling for the girl helping him study instead"-- Danyal Jilani may not be the smartest guy in the room, but he's funny, gorgeous, and going to make a great chef one day. His father doesn't approve of his career choice, but what matters more to Danyal is the opinion...

"A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother--and how she retook control of her life. Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother's dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother...

This searing graphic memoir portrays the impact of gun violence through a fresh lens with urgency, humanity, and a very personal hope.

Kindra Neely never expected it to happen to her. No one does. Sure, she’d sometimes been close to gun violence, like when the house down the street from her childhood home in Texas was targeted in a drive-by shooting. But now she lived in Oregon, where she spent her time swimming in rivers with...

Winner of the 2023 YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Young People's Literature

A Coretta Scott King Award Author and Illustrator Honor Book

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

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Seventeen-year-old Poppy takes a home DNA test and unravels her parents' identities and their decades of careful work to keep their family anonymous, allowing the past to come dangerously close to catching up to them.