Before the Portland nonprofit Literary Arts announced the 35 works named as finalists in the 2025 Oregon Book Awards competition, it notified each author with an email. 

Leslie Barnard Booth and Deborah Hopkinson got two emails.

Booth and Hopkinson stand out among the 2025 Oregon Book Award finalists for each having two books in the running. That’s happened five other times in recent years: April Henry in 2022, Hopkinson and Elizabeth Rusch in 2021, Rosanne Parry in 2020, and Barry Sanders in 2011. 

Henry writes young adult thrillers. Hopkinson, Rusch, and Parry write children’s, middle grade and young adult books. Sanders was nominated for general nonfiction.

“Children’s book authors often publish more than one book in a year, so it’s more likely to happen in that category,” said Susan Moore, Literary Arts’ director of programs for writers.  

Booth’s feat is particularly notable because her picture books, A Stone Is a Story (October 2023) and One Day This Tree Will Fall (March 2024), are finalists in the same category, the Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children’s Literature. Only Henry and Sanders also have pulled off two nominations in the same category in recent years. 

The Oregon Book Award winners will be announced April 28 at The Armory. In the meantime, here are excerpts from a recent conversation with Booth. 

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I understand these are your first two picture books. 

Booth: They are. The other thing about [the nominations] that felt like such an honor to me was just to be nominated alongside authors whose work I know and whose work I admire.

It makes you look like an overnight success. But I’m guessing that’s not the case.

No. When I do school visits, kids will ask, “How long have you been an author?” I think the answer might be since I was 5, if we include my early works, but I’ve definitely been working at this my whole life. Since I knew what an author was, it’s what I wanted to do. Even before I could write, I spent a lot of time just sitting on the floor drawing stories.

I’ve definitely gone through stages where I wondered if being an author was possible, and where I was convinced it wasn’t, and where I felt really discouraged. It’s amazing to be doing what I love. 

Do you have any particular influences as a picture book author?

I love the work of Candace Fleming. She writes a lot of beautiful, lyrical nonfiction that I really admire. 

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I love Water Is Water by Miranda Paul, illustrated by Jason Chin. That was definitely one of the books I first gravitated toward as I was starting to write for children. I started out writing for adults in my MFA program [at University of Oregon]. But I had always wanted to write for children, and when I had children of my own, I was completely immersed in picture books. It’s all I read. I encountered some picture books that I just thought were phenomenal, and I also thought aligned with my curiosity and my interest, and that was one of them.

Let’s talk about the books. They both dive deeply into the natural world. You say on your website, “I’m passionate about affirming and making space for children’s curiosity, creativity, and innate connection to the natural world.” Tell me more about that.

I’ve always been drawn to nature and felt at home in nature, and also had experiences in nature that just felt transcendent. That feeling of staring out at a big ocean and contemplating how small you are, but also how you’re part of this immense world, the immensity of time. 

When I had kids and when I taught – I taught elementary school and I also substitute-taught at Childswork, which is a preschool in Portland – I got to see children interacting with the natural world. And I was just so taken by the way they would slow down and let the beauty and intricacy of nature in.

A Stone Is a Story – the main source of inspiration for that was my daughter asking me, “Where do rocks come from?” It seems like a simple question, but it’s profound and a hard question to answer, and it was just fascinating to dig into it and try to provide an answer for her.

Even though these books are nonfiction, reading them feels a lot like reading poetry, and they look kind of like poetry, too. Was that a conscious decision, or is that something that just came out of you?

From A Stone Is a Story:
A stone is a story.
A stone has been magma, oozing under Earth’s crust.
A stone has been lava, gushing from the mouth of a volcano.

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From One Day This Tree Will Fall:
First, you should know
that long, long ago… 
a tiny seed set sail.
Folded inside it
was a tiny tree –
this tree.

Yeah, that book Water Is Water – at some point a light bulb went on and I realized it was a poem. I got to see how children reacted to it and to the music of the language in that book. 

I love working on the sound design of a picture book to make it almost musical, because unlike so many other forms, it’s really meant to be read aloud. It’s a performance for children. So I do think of these books as poems when I sit down to write them, and I think a lot about the music in the words.

Were you inspired by any particular places?

The Painted Hills are one of the most beautiful places I’ve visited. And they are one of those places where I feel like I can’t help contemplating the immensity of time and having that good feeling, that peaceful feeling of being a small part of a big world. So I’m sure that played into [A Stone Is a Story].

For One Day This Tree Will Fall: Tryon Creek is a place where there’s so many nurse logs, and that’s a place that I hiked often with my children when they were young, and that’s a phenomenon that we looked at together. They were interested in getting down and looking at the little bugs in the logs, asking questions about the moss growing on the logs, all those little things. So certainly, being in the lush temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest definitely informed that book.

What do you hope children take away from these books?

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I hope they will be inspired to go outside, explore nature, ask questions about their world, and be stewards of the Earth.