"An Appetite for Miracles" Selected for the 2025 Alexandria Award
Laekan Zea Kemp’s An Appetite for Miracles, a young adult verse novel about finding beauty and goodness amidst brokenness, has been selected as the winner of the 2025 Alexandria Award.
The Alexandria Award recognizes a middle grade or young adult book that advances Gospel values through the positive actions and portrayals of tenacious adolescents. It is named for Saint Catherine of Alexandria, an adolescent Christian of the fourth century who was an eager student and a famed orator.
An Appetite for Miracles follows Danna and Raúl’s struggles with falling short of expectations and accompanying others through pain and grief. Both teenagers grapple with and grow in their relationships with God, reckoning with the faith in which they are raised and how it stands up to adversity. Strengthened by one another and ultimately their families, Danna and Raúl encounter joy in the face of suffering.
Dr. Michael Macaluso, the founder of the award and adjunct associate teaching professor explains why the novel stood out to the committee: "The Alexandria Award was founded to reach a broad range of adolescent readers. An Appetite for Miracles is intended for our most mature high school readers looking for resonance with the contemporary adolescent experience. Reminiscent of the themes and storytelling of The House on Mango Street, An Appetite for Miracles offers a complex, unflinching, and ultimately redemptive portrait of young people wrestling with the messy realities of modern life while holding fast to hope and unexpected moments of grace."
“I am incredibly honored that An Appetite for Miracles is this year's winner of The Alexandria Award,” Kemp wrote. “St. Catherine of Alexandria used her words wisely and for a greater purpose. This is what I try to do with all of my work. Receiving this award named for such a master of rhetoric gives me hope that I achieved what I set out to with this story, particularly the choice to write it in verse in an effort to challenge my own rhetorical prowess.
But beyond the form and the poetic choices, this story is really about faith, hope, and all of the ways we reach for something larger than ourselves. The ways we pray. Which for the characters in the story, takes the form of everything from cooking a meal for someone they love to singing and strumming a guitar. Because it is in the giving that we became the prayer itself. The question and the answer. The hope and the miracle.”
Dan O’Reilly is a high school ELA teacher at Archbishop Molloy High School in Briarwood, New York who is currently teaching the novel: “An Appetite for Miracles portrays the authentic, relational faith that many young people are seeking today. It does not shy away from the difficult questions and doubts with which teenagers often wrestle. Young people deserve engaging literature that depicts and welcomes honest questioning in their journey of faith. With arresting poetry, Laekan Zea Kemp asserts the dignity of all characters, from teenagers struggling to love themselves to marginalized and neglected groups, such as the elderly and those who have been incarcerated. Above all, this book offers hope to young people: not a trite cliché, but a promise to endure in hope with the help of community, vulnerability, and faith.”
The Center for Literacy Education, which is housed in Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives, created the award to respond to the need for high-quality, highly engaging contemporary books in classrooms and the desire of Catholic school teachers to teach classroom books — classic or contemporary — through a lens of faith and Catholic social teaching.
Copies of the book will be given to schools across the country, including local schools in South Bend, Indiana, and will be accompanied by a curriculum insert designed by an expert teacher offering a full, sample lesson plan – including suggested classroom learning goals, activities and discussion guides for thinking about the book through a lens of faith and Catholic social teaching.
As Dr. Macaluso notes, we advise educators that the text contains mature language and content best suited for older adolescent audiences. As always, we encourage educators and parents to preview the material to ensure it aligns with their specific classroom and community standards. Like those of many students, these protagonists’ experiences are complex.
St. Catherine is the patron of students, librarians and educators, and the award commemorates her youth, bravery, tenacity, enthusiasm for education and her home in Alexandria — famed location of the Great Library. St. Catherine boldly defended the faith and protested injustices of her time, including the persecution of Christians. Her efforts led to the conversion of hundreds of people before she was martyred at 18.
Previous winners of the Alexandria Award are When Stars Are Scattered (Mohamed & Jamieson), Scythe (Shusterman), A Wish in the Dark (Soontornvat), and The Ogress and the Orphans (Barnhill).
Copies of An Appetite for Miracles can be requested using this link while supplies last. A free complete unit, with materials linked to each lesson, is available using this link, and a supplemental curriculum document is available here.
