Voting closes on Monday, December 11

Award announced on Saturday, December 15

Vote now for the Baby Hearts Press

Adult book Award Winner

In this inspiring memoir, Emily Falcon chronicles her lifelong journey with a congenital cardiac condition. In 1982, at seven weeks old, she had a heart attack that destroyed forty percent of the left side of her heart. This was her entry into a world of multiple cardiac procedures, surgeries, and hospitalizations, and a later diagnosis of glaucoma. Balancing these serious conditions defined her life.

Falcon's memoir is a story of survival and how her physical situation shaped and limited her. She intends this story to be a helpful resource to families, caregivers, and physicians who want to gain insight into a patient's point of view.

This is a wonderful 30 day devotional for congenital heart defect patient. It's to help guide and inspires us through our ups and downs of living with an invisible illness.

Tom and Kat Hansen’s lives were radically changed when their son, Harding, was diagnosed with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) during a routine ultrasound appointment.

They initially believed the hardships that awaited would surely destroy them, but they made the life-altering decision to use the hardships to positively transform their family. Each open heart surgery, medical complication, and lengthy hospital stay taught them a powerful life lesson, and they discovered a life that is richer and more fulfilling than they could have imagined.

In Hope and Courage, Tom and Kat Hansen draw from their experience as they equip, motivate and inspire parents like themselves to prevail through the challenges that come with being the parent of a child with CHD. Their empathetic storytelling and six practical life lessons will guide parents through any hardships they may endure, while preparing them for what to expect along the way.

Emotional Recovery from Congenital Heart Disease by Richard Schwindt, M.S.W., R.S.W.

Richard Schwindt M.S.W., R.S.W., is a working therapist with CHD, an illness he shares with his grandson. Richard offers practical help for managing the most common challenges: anxiety, depression, body image, navigating the medical system, self-care and relationships. He addresses difficult subjects, including sexuality and grief, with compassion, humor and wisdom. This is a primer for living life with joy and achievement, no matter what challenges congenital heart disease throws your way.

In A Heartbeat: A Baby's Heart, A Surgeon's Hands, A Life of Miracles is an emotional story about a child born in 1960 with a complex congenital heart defect: double-inlet, left ventricle with complexities. Although the doctors did not expect Kim to live more than a month, she tells her story of all the trials and triumphs of her life with CHD. It is truly inspiring to see where God's hand has lead her all these years.

The Snow Trilogy by Amy M. Le

On April 30, 1975, Saigon falls and the Vietnam War ends, but Black April marks the beginning of despair for Snow, a young Vietnamese woman who finds herself abandoned by her husband and raising a baby on her own.

Based on her mother's true story of survival after the fall of Saigon, author Amy M. Le paints a gripping tale of her family's perseverance to escape persecution in war-torn Vietnam, survive the refugee camps, and rebuild a new life in America.

At the heart of this trilogy is the human spirit to survive and thrive in the midst of trauma and PTSD.

The Tin Man Diaries byJamie Alcroft

A commercial airliner courses through the sky at 30,000 feet on its way to Los Angeles. On the plane, a 56-year-old professional comedian has the type of heart attack most people don’t survive. But this guy does because he wants the chance to craft the windfall of material that dying will provide. Twelve medically miraculous years later, our hero’s heart is attacking him again, and this time, it’s in cahoots with his pacemaker, his liver, and his age. Learning he cannot live without a new heart, he chooses to fight. What’s it like to be told the only way you can live is if someone else dies? If he gets these previously enjoyed organs, will it feel like someone else’s heart beating in his chest? Can he hang on long enough to know? Why, how, and if he hangs on is answered across 82 diary entries chronicling as many days spent in the Transplant Center at Cedars-Sinai, waiting, hoping against the odds for a perfect confluence of circumstances to grant him resurrection. They say a dying man’s life flashes before him. But for our Tin Man, it’s more of a meander. Eighty-two excruciating days of looking back, in slow motion, at a highly unusual life, lived in wonderment, drama, fear, a dash of shame...and enduring love. The Tin Man Diaries leads you on a life-or-death quest through a postmodern OZ in search of a heart.

A fearful mom finds faith battling for her daughters life against odds in a raw but inspirational true story of trial and triumph.

Jenny’s infant daughter, Faith, is diagnosed with a rare and serious heart condition, leaving odds for survival grim. Jenny, a new Christian, digs heels in on a God quest in search of the child-like faith God wants her to have. The duo battles their way through six radical open-heart surgeries over the course of eighteen years. After Jenny’s husband dies unexpectedly, fear takes hold. Faith requires two more major heart surgeries. The battle between life and death continues while they stand in perseverance and cling to hope. Tribulations grow bigger, but God shines brighter as He intricately weaves victory through the battlefield. God reveals his power in unimaginable ways.

Healing Hearts and Minds by Tracy Livecchi, LCSW and Liza Morton, PhD

Full of evidence-based, easy to understand information about CHD, Healing Hearts and Minds offers strategies for learning to thrive despite living with this condition, but most importantly it will offer hope and connection.

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most commonly diagnosed birth abnormality in the US. With great advances in surgery and medicine, however, survival rates have improved by 75% since the 1940s. Welcome news, of course, as only a few decades ago these birth defects were considered a death sentence, but as with any chronic condition, survival does not mean the issue is cured. While much attention has rightly been focused on the medical needs of these children, almost none has been paid to the psychosocial impacts on these individuals, especially as they grow, mature, and become adults living with a serious, chronic medical condition. Prevalence rates for anxiety, depression, and PTSD are significantly higher (2-3x in some cases) for people living with CHD than the general adult population. Liza Morton and Tracy Livecchi are both mental health professionals who have developed a specialty in working with clients who have chronic medical conditions, and they are both themselves living with CHD. In this book they set out to provide the resources and support they have been looking for their entire adult lives. While their powerful personal stories are woven into the narrative, the book is focused on providing evidence-based coping and self-care skills for adults living with CHD.