Writer and University of Windsor librarian Heidi LM Jacobs has won the 2024 Ontario Speaker’s Book Award.

Jacobs, who won for her book 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year (Biblioasis), was named the winner of this year’s prize at a ceremony at Queen’s Park on Nov. 4.

The book tells the story of the Coloured All-Stars, a baseball team from Chatham, Ontario, that broke the colour barrier in baseball more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did the same in the major leagues, and is based on material from scrapbooks, newspapers, and oral histories from some of the players and their families.

The Speaker’s Book Award is an annual award, launched in 2012, honouring nonfiction books by Ontario authors that reflect the province’s diverse culture and history, with special consideration given to books focusing on Ontario’s parliamentary heritage and on provincial political discourse.

Jacobs’s book was one of six shortlisted for this year’s prize.