The Commonwealth Club hands out its annual California Book Awards in San Francisco on June 10th, honoring novelist Marianne Wiggins, essayist Rebecca Solnit, and poet August Kleinzahler with this year’s Gold Medals.

Wiggins won for Evidence of Things Unseen, a novel that describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age through the main character, a true believer in science and the future of technology. Wiggins is the author of seven novels, including John Dollar and Almost Heaven, and has won a Whiting Award and a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

Solnit won for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which examines the life of Muybridge, a pioneer of stop–action photography. His breakthrough made movies possible. Solnit, a critic, museum curator, and political activist, also is the author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking and Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism.

Kleinzahler won for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. He finds inspiration in everything from road trips to jazz, from Mongol hordes to the ominous roar of fighter jetsHis other books include Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems: 1975-1990 and the upcoming Cutty, One Rock.

The Commownwealth Club also awarded the Silver Medal for Californiana to Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman for The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. Other silver medals went to Tobias Wolff (Old School: A Novel); Adam Johnson (Parasites Like Us); ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere); Bram Dijkstra (American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950); Jeanne DuPrau (The City of Ember); and Yuyi Morales (Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book).

Jurors awarded William Vollmann and McSweeney’s Books a Silver Medal for Notable Contribution to Publishing for Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down. They also offered a special acknowledgement to Joan Didian, a fifth generation Californian, for Where I was From. Jurors commented that Didion “dramatically highlights the gap between California’s rosy notion of itself as a land that stood for individual entrepreneurship and the reality of growing government control and reliance on federal money.”