English nerds galore.

The 35th annual Northern California Book Awards went down this weekend in the heart of the city, a bijou event at the San Francisco Main Public Library. Going strong in its fourth decade, the awards were held to recognize authors, poets and translators from all around Northern California.

The crowd was riddled with writers, their family and friends, literary agents, book reviewers, media hosts and book lovers alike, who filled up the auditorium in honor of those who submitted literature that was published for the first time. The ceremony began with monologist Josh Kornbluth recounting a story of his days as copy editor. He had become such a compulsive proofreader that he tried to stop the paper from going to print because he was sure there was an italicized nine-point font period.

If that didn’t sound geeky enough, other writers followed suit and cracked jokes that would not have otherwise been understood without some sort of background in English studies. Jokes about apostrophe placement, brevity and Medieval French sarcasm had the audience roaring with laughter.

Joshua Mohr, fiction winner for his book “All This Life,” couldn’t have put it better when he received his award: “I appreciate the room full of nerds on a beautiful Sunday afternoon,” he said. “I’m glad to be around my kind of people.”

There were 11 winners in categories that ranged from children’s literature, translations in poetry and fiction, creative nonfiction, YA, poetry, fiction, groundbreaker book, and even lifetime achievement. Most of the recipients who were present to accept their honor talked about their journeys when writing and read excerpts from their works. However, there was stand-in to scold the crowd by saying, “Aren’t you all suppose to be writing?”

“Delicate Monsters” YA fiction winner Stephanie Kuehn recounted the roadblocks she faced with the novel. Delving into “darker aspects of human nature” and taking the most risks in her third book, the narrative deals with suicide, alcoholism and depression. Like many writers, she found it difficult to depict the tendencies of her characters, however got the support and research needed in order to pull through and make her novel a reality.

These book awards were unlike anything I expected, as the themes and stories explored in each text were on all different ends of the spectrum. Winners included topics such as fact intertwined with conspiracy of the Nazi Party and J.F.K. — all revolving around one man who kept his presence behind the scenes — in “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbot. Poetry about “Times Beach” by John Shoptaw was named aptly for St. Louis, Missouri’s ghost town after the 1983 dioxin exposure, a highly toxic pollutant, which was the largest contamination in U.S. history and resulted in the state officially dissolving the city.

So many different angles were tackled and executed exceptionally in each of the nominees’ writings. A panel of volunteer readers read nominees’ works, some of who were those same book review editors and media hosts scattered amongst the crowd.

The book awards are sponsored by Poetry Flash, a California literary review and 501(c)3 nonprofit literary arts organization that “publishes reviews of poetry and literary fiction, poems, interviews, essays and submission and award information for all creative writers,” online and in print, according to the organization. Poetry Flash hosts the Northern California Book Awards every year and urges book lovers to be part of the experience to make next year’s ceremony an even livelier celebration of debut texts. For more information and literary events happening in the Bay Area, visit poetryflash.org.