Silver Medal winner 2016 Mom's Choice Awards.
Second edition placed third on the Gittle List of 2015s best indie picture books.
First edition was voted second best children's book in 2014 on Preditors and Editors.
2010 - “The Amida Tree”, Third Place Children’s Story judged by Gordon Korman: "This piece works so well. There's beauty in the simplicity of its telling, and the communication between the woman and the tree is hauntingly believable."
Story Monster approved!
"To Each His Song" short story (As Bonnie Blake)
Chosen for a year's best anthology to raise money for CCBC Close Ups: Best Stories for Teens. Red Deer Press. Previously published in Takes: Stories for Young Adults, Thistledown Press Ltd. and later picked up for school anthologies in the U.S. Many Cultures, Many Voices: Collection Two. Perfection Learning.
Third Place Short Story Fiction
2013 - "At the Root of the Family Tree", Third Place Fiction judged by Angie Abdou: "At the Root of the Family Tree offers an insightful and emotional exploration of family dysfunction and memory. The writer shows the extent to which we are shaped by childhood trauma, even when memory of that trauma is deeply repressed."
Second Place Children's Story
2012 - "Raising Funds", Second Place Children's Story judged by Richard Scrimger: "Raising Funds is a small-scale story with large implications, a culture clash told by a sympathetic outsider, with some genuine surprises along the way."
Third Place Short Story Fiction
2011 - "Aberrations", Third Prize Fiction judged by Fred Stenson: This author has exciting gifts. What a talent! To buy as part of a collection entitled Inhale http://amzn.com/B007ZSZYYW
Third Place Memoir
2010 - “The Frog and the Snake”, Third Place Memoir judged by Anne Coleman: "This is a clear, effectively told account of a deeply unpleasant case of bullying, demonstrating how infectious the behaviour is, drawing others to side with the bully, and how painful, and in this case, devastating, the results are for the victim - or so the mother suspects they will be. Yet the little girl's final philosophical understanding and coming to terms with what happened is fascinating, and suggests another possible outcome."