AWBA Q+A with Colleen Kowalski

Meet a member of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Team!

Colleen Kowalski began her work at the Cleveland Foundation in 2024 as the Social Media Manager for the Foundation and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. After starting out as a nursing student at Case Western Reserve University, Colleen found a stronger pull toward communications and earned a degree in Promotional Communications and Marketing from Cleveland State University, graduating summa cum laude in 2018.

Before working on the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Colleen held roles in event management, content writing, influencer marketing, and brand management for a variety of hospitality, corporate, and nonprofit organizations.

Can you share a bit about your connection to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards? 

My first week as the social media manager for the Cleveland Foundation was during the 89th Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. At the time, I was unaware Cleveland was home to an international book prize. In the years since, I have been honored to meet and interview our award-winning authors, connect with jurors and readers from across the country, and experience once in a lifetime author events in Cleveland!

What was a book or an interaction with literature that first sparked your interest in reading? 

When I was four years old, my mom used to volunteer in the school library and would bring me with her often. While she was reading stories out loud to my sister’s class, I would wander the bookshelves, pull out every Amelia Bedelia book I could find, and lay in the middle of the aisle reading about Amelia “dusting the drapes” and “dressing the turkey” for hours. My mom noticed how much I loved reading about Amelia’s antics that she gave me her original copies of the books from her childhood. I love how books have the ability to connect people across generations years after they are written.

Which book or books in the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards canon resonate the most with you and why?

My favorite Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winners are “Feeding Ghosts” by Tessa Hulls and “The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders” by Sarah Aziza. These memoirs traverse the author’s families through generations and explore the importance of understanding their home. In “The Hollow Half,” Sarah weaves her story of battling an eating disorder with her grandmother and father’s story of living in Palestine before and after the Nakba. In the graphic memoir “Feeding Ghosts,” Tessa illustrates her experience working on the memoir while sharing what she learned about her grandmother and mother’s lives from research trips to China. It was truly an honor to meet both Sarah and Tessa, and share what their works mean to me, when they came to Cleveland to be inducted into the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards canon.

Explore Colleen’s Favorite Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Winners