Where Hope Meets the Written Word!
The Hearten Awards Celebrate Stories That Inspire and Heal
The submissions for the 2025 Awards are underway and Hearten closes on August 31, 2025!
In a world that often feels overwhelming, there’s profound power in stories that remind us of human goodness, resilience, and the possibility of transformation. The Hearten Awards—a wonderful offshoot of our Journey Awards—celebrate the uplifting and inspiring non-fiction narratives that restore faith, spark hope, and illuminate the bright threads woven through even the most challenging experiences.
While our Journey Awards honor the courage to transform pain into purpose, the Hearten Awards recognize stories that already shine with light—memoirs of healing, guides to personal growth, family chronicles that celebrate love, and adventures that remind us why life is worth living fully. These are the books that leave readers feeling more hopeful about the world and their place in it.
The Healing Power of Hopeful Stories
Inspirational non-fiction serves a vital role in our literary landscape, offering readers not just entertainment but genuine nourishment for the spirit. These stories matter because they show us what’s possible when we choose hope over despair, connection over isolation, and growth over stagnation.
Whether it’s a memoir of someone finding love later in life, a humorous look at family dynamics that celebrates rather than criticizes, or practical wisdom delivered with warmth and encouragement, Hearten Award submissions share a common thread: they make the world feel a little brighter. In times when positive news feels rare, these stories become beacons of possibility.
The best uplifting non-fiction doesn’t ignore life’s challenges—it shows how those challenges can become catalysts for joy, connection, and personal transformation. These authors understand that hope is not naive optimism, but rather the hard-won wisdom that comes from choosing to see possibility even in difficult circumstances.
Celebrating Our 2024 Grand Prize Winner!
We’re delighted to honor Lynne Spriggs O’Connor, whose beautiful memoir Elk Love: A Montana Memoir claimed the 2024 Hearten Grand Prize with a story that perfectly embodies the transformative power of following your heart toward healing. At forty-two, Lynne left her East Coast life behind to pursue her dream of deeper connection with nature in Montana’s Big Sky Country, finding unexpected love with Harrison, a rancher thirteen years her senior.
Elk Love chronicles how loneliness can give way to wonder when we’re brave enough to listen—to nature, to others, and to our own hearts. With her dog Willow as companion, Lynne discovers “a wild language that moves beyond words” in the seasonal rhythms of ranch life. In addition to ongoing promotional features, Elk Love will be regularly promoted throughout the year and for the next five years in our upcoming Hall of Fame posts. Lynne Spriggs O’Connor will also be invited to participate in a Chanticleer 10-Question Interview, and Elk Love will receive a coveted Chanticleer Editorial Review.
Categories That Celebrate Every Path to Inspiration
The Hearten Awards welcome uplifting stories across a diverse range of approaches and themes:
- Humorous – Stories that find joy and laughter in life’s absurdities, proving that humor can be profoundly healing
- Motivational – Narratives that inspire readers to pursue their dreams, overcome obstacles, and believe in their potential
- Advice/Inspiration – Wisdom-filled works that offer practical guidance delivered with warmth and encouragement
- Family and Chosen Family – Celebrations of the relationships that sustain us, whether biological or built through choice and love
- Self-Discovery/Coming-of-Age – Journeys of personal growth that inspire readers to embrace their own transformation
Each category represents a different pathway to inspiration, united by the belief that our stories have the power to encourage, heal, and uplift others.
Other August Non-Fiction Opportunities
The Hearten Awards are part of Chanticleer’s comprehensive celebration of narrative non-fiction, all closing at the end of August:
Journey Awards – Courageous stories of overcoming adversity and transforming trauma into purpose
Nellie Bly Awards – Investigative journalism and exposé works that uncover important truths
Military & Front Line Awards – Stories of military service and front-line experiences
September non-fiction divisions include: Instruction and Insight (I&I), Harvey Chute, and Mind & Spirit Awards.
Looking at Stories That Inspire
Check out some of these uplifting works we’ve celebrated recently that showcase the power of hopeful storytelling!
A Path to Excellence
By Tony Jeton Selimi
A Hearten First Place Winner!
On the belief that life isn’t just the random cards one is dealt, A Path to Excellence by Tony Jeton Selimi offers a blueprint—the octagon of excellence—to succeed personally, professionally, and spiritually.
Transcending the pitfalls and spontaneous stumbling blocks along the path of life can open the door to self-actualization and progression. As someone who experienced bullying, sexual abuse, early disability, and homelessness, Selimi sets on to become a beacon of light to the hopeless and marginalized.
Within each soul lies a bud of genius waiting to blossom. This book focuses on purpose, vision, and persistence to clear the way to that fullest potential. Affirming challenges as immutable truths of life, Selimi employs Buddhist teaching and personal anecdotes to encourage a head-on confrontation with one’s struggles and promotes a feeling of gratitude. As a blend of philosophical wisdom and practical experience, the initial chapters help readers acknowledge their current life situation, perceiving challenges as epochs of potential.
Running Away From The Circus
By Nove Meyers
Heartens 2023 Grand Prize Winner!
Debut author Nove Meyers breathes life into the big tent of human aspirations and desperations, from his birth into a raucous circus atmosphere to his diligent study for Catholic priesthood.
Running Away from the Circus is a vibrant chronicle that opens with a vignette of his grandmother, clad in sequins and flying on a trapeze. She spun like a top to enthusiastic applause under the circus tent, until the fateful day when she included her young child in the act, dropping her thirty feet to the sawdust-covered floor below. But this did not prevent Nove Meyers from being born and having a story to tell.
The boyhood described was as wild as the circus acts. He was encouraged to smoke cigarettes like his father and watched in astonishment as his mother burned up paper money, possibly to protect his uncle, a counterfeiter. Yet despite his unusual upbringing as one of the family’s third generation of circus owners, Meyers was taken regularly to Catholic church services. There, he discovered God, an entity as mysterious as the traveling circus and carnie crowds he was raised among.
The Best I Can Do
By Cheryl Landes
Cheryl Landes’s The Best I Can Do: A True Story of Navigating the Complexities of Mental Illness and Homelessness, follows the devastation of a happy marriage as mental illness slowly takes over the mind of her husband. Landes must then make the journey back to peace.
Cheryl and her husband, Tom, had known each other since their college days. A classic love story, Landes does a beautiful job with the set up, and then delivers the tragedy of Tom’s spiral into paranoia as their plans for the future begin to fall apart.
The Best I Can Do tells the story of what happens when Tom insists someone is trailing him, believing a car passes by his and Cheryl’s home every day even though no one else sees it. He claims someone installed listening devices in their house and refuses to speak unless his white-noise devices are on. As his paranoia increases he locks the refrigerator with a chain and a padlock to protect himself from the certainty someone—perhaps Cheryl—wants to poison him.
Teaching in the Dark
By Genet Simone
A Hearten First Place Winner and Cover Design Grand Prize Winner!
How does place shape who we are—and who we’ll become? In this memoir, Teaching in the Dark, Genét Simone puts that question to the test by recounting her first year as a teacher.
The initial year of teaching is never an easy feat, but for Simone it was especially challenging, and transformative. She spent it with Native students in the remote island village of Shishmaref, on the Arctic edge of Alaska—no small wonder the school year became an unforgettable one.
Today, Simone has decades of teaching experience to draw upon. Yet, in this memoir she rarely employs her present voice to reflect on the past. Instead, the narrator remains in the moment: a young and inexperienced Simone, who only knows that she feels destined to be a teacher. When she signs up for the Shishmaref teaching job, she doesn’t even realize that it’s on an island.
Equipped with snow boots and passion, she arrives on the island only to realize just how unprepared she is.
Fishing With Hyenas
By Theresa Mathews
A Journey First Place Winner!
Theresa Mathews’ memoir, Fishing with Hyenas, is filled with adventure, love, and the spirit of an explorer, all on the high seas. In the audio version, the author herself tells this gripping story of love and death, grief and recovery.
Mathews begins the book in a place most difficult for her. She takes us through her emotional devastation at the news of her husband’s death. We see all the stages of her grief from the initial call: denial, disbelief, bargaining, and finally acceptance. Readers will be hooked in the first chapter.
She then deftly fills in the gaps with the backstory of how she met her husband Bart, their first date, their decision to commit to one another, and her first time she went for a ride on his Harley. These are often hilarious recaps of her anger and frustration, and her examination of what this relationship with a man who loved the sea would mean for her city-girl life.
Mathews alternates between the present and past with perfect pacing, giving readers a balance between the immersion in and relief from the intense emotion of her husband’s unexpected death.
These stories demonstrate how the best inspirational non-fiction creates genuine connection between author and reader, offering both comfort and motivation for life’s journey.
See the Chanticleer Difference for Yourself!
We’re honored to receive the hopeful stories that authors trust us with each year. The Chanticleer International Book Awards offers an incredible $30,000 in cash, prizes, and promotion across all divisions!
The Hearten Awards provide recognition for the often-undervalued but deeply important work of creating hope through storytelling. Whether you’re sharing your own journey of transformation, offering wisdom gained through experience, or simply celebrating the beauty you’ve found in life, these awards honor the courage it takes to choose optimism and share light with the world.
Your Story of Hope Matters
In a time when the world needs more hope, your uplifting story could be exactly what someone needs to hear. Whether it’s a memoir of healing, a humorous look at family life, or practical wisdom delivered with warmth, your positive narrative has the power to encourage, inspire, and heal.
Share your story of hope and healing—the deadline is August 31, 2025!
Submit to the Hearten Awards today and help us celebrate the transformative power of uplifting stories!
Theresa Mathews’ memoir, Fishing with Hyenas, is filled with adventure, love, and the spirit of an explorer, all on the high seas. In the audio version, the author herself tells this gripping story of love and death, grief and recovery.
Romance, typhoons, and exotic scenery highlight this exceptional sea-faring memoir about love and surviving loss by debut author, Theresa Mathews.
