Artists of Utah and 15 Bytes are pleased to announce that Christopher Cokinos has been selected as the winner of the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Creative Nonfiction for Still As Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow.

In this expansive, luminously crafted work from Simon & Schuster, Cokinos undertakes a sweeping exploration of humanity’s relationship with the Moon—scientific, cultural, artistic, and deeply personal. Moving fluidly across thousands of years, he traces the Moon’s presence in ancient cosmologies, mythic stories, early astronomical speculation, and the meticulous observations of Renaissance and Enlightenment sky-watchers. He brings to life the nineteenth-century “selenographers” who attempted to map the lunar surface in exquisite detail, illuminating how their devotion and imagination shaped modern lunar science.

Cokinos’s narrative then arcs into the twentieth century, capturing the exhilaration, ambition, and geopolitical drama of the Apollo missions while revealing the quieter human moments behind the spectacle—the engineers, astronauts, and scientists whose lives were transformed by their encounters with the Moon. Turning toward the present and future, he examines renewed lunar exploration through Artemis and private aerospace ventures, probing what it means for humanity to return to a place so rich in symbolic meaning yet so scientifically unfinished.

Throughout this wide-ranging history, Cokinos threads his own lifelong bond with the night sky, from childhood telescopes to mature reflections on wonder, loss, and curiosity. His prose is both precise and lyrical, grounded in rigorous research yet suffused with awe. The result is a narrative that invites readers not only to learn about the Moon but to feel the Moon—to understand how it has shaped human imagination, scientific ambition, storytelling traditions, environmental awareness, and our own interior landscapes. Still As Bright stands as an extraordinary meditation on a celestial companion that continues to reflect our fears, hopes, questions, and desires back to us.

Christopher Cokinos is an American poet and nonfiction writer whose essays and books explore nature, environment, and space. Originally from Indianapolis, he holds degrees from Indiana University and Washington University and has taught literature and science writing at several universities. Cokinos has long lived and written in Utah—including his years at Utah State University, where he founded and edited Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing—and he continues to maintain deep ties to northern Utah.

We congratulate Christopher Cokinos on this remarkable achievement and celebrate the insight, imagination, and scholarly devotion he brings to the literary and scientific life of Utah and beyond.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.