The American Bar Association has awarded Nell Bernstein’s Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison a Silver Gavel Award, honoring work in media and the arts that helps foster the American public’s understanding of the legal system. The award was presented at a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on July 21. Bernstein’s book, which has been called “an epic work of investigative journalism that lays bare our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons” by the San Francisco Chronicle, was also on the shortlist for the Ridenhour Book Prize for its promotion of social justice and dedication to truth-telling.

In an awards ceremony on June 2, Martin Duberman’s Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS, won the nonfiction Lambda Literary Award for excellence in LGBT literature. The win was prominently mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Gay City News. Duberman’s book, a moving dual biography of two men fighting for their lives in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, is also a finalist for a Stonewall Book Award (sponsored by the American Library Association), as well as the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.