Two books published by Ave Maria Press won top honors in the 2016 Association of Catholic Publishers Excellence in Publishing Awards.

Maria Morera Johnson’s My Badass Book of Saints: Courageous Women Who Showed Me How to Live took first place in the inspirational category.

Our Lady, Undoer of Knots: A Living Novena by Marge Fenelon took second place in the inspirational category.

Johnson is a CatholicMom.com blogger, speaker, and cohost of SPQN’s Catholic Weekend. She recently retired as a composition and literature professor and director of English learning support at Georgia Piedmont Technical College.

My Badass Book of Saints explores the quality of twenty-four holy women who lived lives of virtue in unexpected and often difficult circumstances. Johnson also shares her experience as a first-generation Cuban-American, educator of at-risk college students, and caregiver for a husband with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Through humorous, empowering, and touching portraits of twenty-four spiritual mentors who inspired her—including Servant of God Sr. Blandina Segale who tried to turn the heart of Billy the Kid—Johnson shows how their bravery, integrity, selflessness, perseverance, and hope helped her and can help others have courage to reach for a closer connection to God.

Fenelon’s Our Lady, Undoer of Knots creates a new devotional practice—a guided meditation—from the classic novena that is a favorite of Pope Francis. She reflects on nine sacred sites associated with the Holy Father’s 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land to help readers explore the “knots” or impossible situations in their own lives in order to find peace. Fenelon is a veteran Catholic journalist, columnist, and author of a number of books related to Marian devotion and Catholic family life, including Imitating Mary.

The awards will be presented at the twentieth annual Catholic Marketing Network International Trade Show in Schaumburg, Illinois, in July.

Stephen Binz—author of Ave’s Transformed by God’s Word—won third place in the inspirational category for Saint Peter: Flawed, Forgiven, and Faithful, and first place in the scripture category for Divine Mercy, part of the Threshold Bible Study series. Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Ave's Mortal Blessings, was awarded first place for a biography, Flannery O'Connor.

View all of the award winners at the ACP website