American Manga Awards Nominees and Winners

Photo by Katie Alford

Manga exploded in popularity in the U.S. over the last 10 years.  While already on an upward trend, demand skyrocketed during COVID.  It's a juggernaut for our Teen collection's circulation statistics, with most of our Manga titles circulating within the last 6 months. That particular section tends to only get weeded due to condition a ordered quickly.

I plan to write about building Manga collections, advocating for it, and how to stay up to date on new manga titles in a later blog post but for now I want to shout out the American Manga Awards.

The second annual awards announced their winner last Thursday (determined by votes from professionals working in an editorial capacity with North American manga publishers). The pertinent ones for Teen collections were:

• Best New Manga: The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All, Volume 1, by Sumiko Arai
 (Yen Press) (Rated T, 13+)
• Best Continuing Manga Series: The Apothecary Diaries, Volumes 12 - 13, by Hyuganatsu, with art by Nekokurage (Square Enix Manga & Books) (Rated T, 13+)
• Best New Edition of Classic Manga: Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow, Volumes 1-2, by Asao Takamori and Tetsuya Chiba (Kodansha) (Rated OT, 16+)
• also won for Best Lettering

The Manga Librarian, Ashley Hawkins, wrote a great round up of the nominees with links to reviews for most of the titles. The reviews come from SLJ, Booklist, Manga in the Middle, Anime News Network, and the Manga Librarian herself. I found it incredibly helpful to have all the titles and links in one place.

To the entire round up, stop here. [American Manga Awards: Nominee Review Round Up! Ashley Hawkins. Manga Librarian blog. August 17, 2025.]