Roxanna Asgarian’s ‘We Were Once a Family’ and Amanda Peters’ ‘The Berry Pickers’ win library medals

By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Loving libraries is not a requirement for receiving an Andrew Carnegie Medal from the American Library Association. But this year’s two winners both say libraries are a reason they became writers. On Saturday, the library association announced that Roxanna Asgarian had won the nonfiction medal for “We Were Once A Family: Love, Death, and Child Removal in America,” her investigation into a family murder-suicide from 2018. The fiction medal was awarded to Amanda Peters for her novel “The Berry Pickers,” a multi-generational story centered around the disappearance of a young Mi’kmaq girl from a blueberry field in Maine.