A Cambridge historian and a one-person Somerville comics publisher are among the winners of this year’s Massachusetts Book Awards, the Commonwealth’s annual honors recognizing outstanding books by Massachusetts authors, artists, poets and publishers.
Jill Lepore, a Harvard University historian and Cambridge resident, won the nonfiction prize for “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” while Zachary Clemente’s Somerville-based Bulgilhan Press received the Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize for “Slices of Life: A Comic Montage,” by Chinese artist Qu.
The Massachusetts Book Awards have been presented annually since 2000 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, a nonprofit and the state’s official affiliate of the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book. The awards recognize works across categories including fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s and young adult literature.
“I’m kind of a lifelong Massachusetts person, so it felt delightful,” said Lepore, a Worcester County native and Harvard professor for more than two decades, of receiving the award.
At the center of “We the People” is what Lepore calls the “philosophy of amendment,” the idea that the ability to modify the U.S. Constitution is foundational to American constitutionalism.
Lepore, 60, noted the Constitution has not been “meaningfully amended” since she was a little girl, when the 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
“A constitution that can no longer be amended is one whose legitimacy is really weakened,” Lepore said. “I wanted to call attention to this as a source of our constitutional frailty.”
The Massachusetts Constitution, and the political fight that preceded it, also plays a central role in that history. Ratified in 1780, Lepore said the Massachusetts Constitution is the oldest written constitution still in use in the world. Massachusetts residents had rejected an earlier proposed constitution that lacked what Lepore described as a “proper” amendment provision, a struggle she said helped establish the philosophy of amendment that would later influence the U.S. Constitution.
Lepore said Cambridge also influenced the book through her children’s experiences at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.
“They had a couple amazing U.S. history teachers and it made me think a lot about the value of doing the work of teaching civics while teaching history,” Lepore said.
Bringing the “sublime mundanity of life” alive
For Clemente, the recognition honors not his own writing, but the painstaking behind-the-scenes work of bringing someone else’s art to readers’ eyes. The Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize is awarded to Massachusetts-based presses and considers the quality of a book’s production, design and printing.
Bulgilhan Press’ “Slices of Life” is a collection of short, wordless comics by Qu, a Chinese artist now living in South Korea. Typically just two or three pages long, the comics capture ordinary experiences such as waking up from a long nap, playing with a pet or spending a day with a friend.
Clemente described the book as a celebration of the “sublime mundanity of life.”
The project began as Qu’s master of fine arts thesis at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where Clemente first encountered her work in 2019. Qu had printed just three copies and was showing them to publishers at the Small Press Expo in Maryland.
Years later, after the book had been published in China, Clemente unexpectedly encountered it again in a catalog sent to him by a foreign-rights agent.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God! I recognize this immediately. I would love to learn more about this,’” Clemente said.
He eventually worked directly with Qu to help craft the first edition ever published in the United States, giving individual comics more room on the page and allowing Qu to update some of her earlier work.
Founded in 2018, besides bringing on the occasional graphic designer, Bulgilhan is essentially a one-person operation Clemente runs as a side project out of his Teele Square home when not working his day job in IT. Clemente spent years writing about comics and helping run the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) before realizing that what he enjoyed most was not writing comics himself, but the work surrounding their creation, including editing, financing, printing, distribution and promotion.
“There’s all these beautiful books out there that I feel like really could use a little bit of extra oomph, a little bit of extra support,” Clemente said. “I also have pretty good taste, and thought it’d be fun to apply that, like, ‘Here are the books I think are amazing, we’ll see if other people agree.’”
Lepore and Clemente will join the other 2026 Massachusetts Book Award recipients at the State House on Oct. 28 for an in-person ceremony celebrating this year’s winners and honorees.
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