ALA Mid-Winter Meeting Awards Round-Up

Caldecott Medal winner (above) and Newbery Medal winner (below)

On January 17, during the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Boston, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the ALA, announced the winners of the prestigious Caldecott and Newbery awards for children's works published in the U.S. during 2004. Kevin Henkes' Kitten's First Full Moon (Greenwillow Books, a HarperCollins imprint), a title selected by independent booksellers in May 2004 as a Children's Summer Book Sense Pick, won the Caldecott Medal for illustration. Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a Simon & Schuster imprint) was awarded the Newbery Medal, which recognizes a distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

Henkes' award marks Greenwillow's first ever Caldecott Medal, according to Josette Kurey, senior manager for publicity, HarperCollins Children's Books. "We are thrilled beyond belief," she told BTW. "We are not quite over the shock and craziness of it. This couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."

At Atheneum, Kira-Kira editor Caitlyn Dlouhy tried to describe the "indescribable." Also the executive editor for Atheneum's Books for Young Readers, Dlouhy had seen Kira-Kira, Kadohata's story of Japanese-American sisters set in the American South of the 1950s and '60s, go through "rewrite after rewrite, to make it as strong as it could be. To realize that other people believe in a book that you believe in so deeply, it's incredible. My head is spinning."

Both houses indicated to BTW that the books were reprinted in mass numbers as soon as the awards were announced. No problems are anticipated for delivery to stores. According to Josette Kurey, senior manager of publicity, HarperCollins Children's Books, the first print for Kitten's First Full Moon was 60,000, and the reprint on Monday was 150,000. Jennifer Zatorski, the publicity manager for S&S Children's Publishing, noted that Atheneum Books for Young Readers has gone back to press for 75,000 copies of Kira-Kira. The first shipment from this printing is scheduled to reach the S&S warehouse by January 28.

The Newbery Honor Books named were:

• Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko (G.P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group);
• The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights by Russell Freedman (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin); and
• Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin).

Caldecott Honor Books named were:

• The Red Book, written and illustrated by Barbara Lehman (Houghton Mifflin Company);
• Coming on Home Soon, illustrated by E.B. Lewis, written by Jacqueline Woodson (G.P. Putnam's Sons); and
• Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, illustrated and written by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children).

The Coretta Scott King Awards, presented annually by the Coretta Scott King Task Force of ALA's Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT), honors African-American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults. They were awarded to:

• Toni Morrison, for Remember: The Journey to School Integration (Houghton Mifflin), and
• Kadir Nelson, illustrator of Ellington Was Not a Street (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers).

Barbara Hathaway, author of Missy Violet and Me (Houghton Mifflin Company), won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award and Frank Morrison, illustrator of Jazzy Miz Mozetta (written by Brenda C. Roberts, Farrar Straus Giroux), is the Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award winner.

The three King Author Honor Books selected were:

• The Legend of Buddy Bush, by Shelia P. Moses (Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster);
• Who Am I Without Him?: Short Stories About Girls and the Boys in Their Lives, by Sharon G. Flake (Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children); and
• Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, by Marilyn Nelson (Front Street).

Two King Illustrator Honor Books were selected:

• God Bless the Child, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins) and
• The People Could Fly: The Picture Book, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, written by Virginia Hamilton (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books).

Meg Rosoff won the 2005 Michael L. Printz Award for her work, how I live now, (Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children's Books). The Printz Award, first presented in 2000, is for excellence in young adult literature. It is administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of ALA, and sponsored by Booklist magazine.

Three Printz Honor Books also were named:

• Airborn, by Kenneth Oppel (EOS, an imprint of HarperCollins);
• Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt (published by Clarion Books, a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint); and
• Chanda's Secrets, by Allan Stratton (Annick Press).

Francesca Lia Block is the recipient of the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring her outstanding contributions to young adult readers. Block's books Weetzie Bat (1989), Witch Baby (1991), Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guy (1992), Missing Angel Juan (1993) and Baby Be-Bop (1996), deal with complex issues such as blended families, many types of love, and the real world challenges teenagers face. The award is administered by YALSA and sponsored by School Library Journal.

The Schneider Family Book Award, donated by Katherine Schneider, Ph.D., and administered by the ALA, honors an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences in three age categories: birth through grade school (age 0 - 10), middle school (age 11 - 13), and teens (age 13 - 18).

My Pal, Victor, written by Diane Gonzales Bertrand and illustrated by Robert L. Sweetland, was named best picture book for young children (Raven Tree Press).

Pam Munoz Ryan was the winner of the middle-school award for Becoming Naomi Leon (Scholastic Press).

The teen award was given to My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir, written by Samantha Abeel (Orchard Books).

The winner of the 2005 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal went to Laurence Yep, for a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children. Yep's numerous works include Dragonwings, The Rainbow People, The Khan's Daughter, and the autobiographical The Lost Garden. His writing spans more than 30 years and includes more than 55 titles. The Wilder Medal, first awarded in 1954, is administered by ALSC.

The annual Robert F. Sibert Award, administered by ALSC and sponsored by Bound to Stay Bound Books, Inc., of Jacksonville, Illinois is presented in honor of Robert F. Sibert, its longtime president.

This year's winner of the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award was Russell Freedman, author of The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Clarion Books, a Houghton Mifflin imprint).

Three Sibert Honor Books also were named:

• Walt Whitman: Words for America, written by Barbara Kerley, illustrated by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.);
• The Tarantula Scientist, written by Sy Montgomery, with photographs by Nic Bishop (Houghton Mifflin); and
• Sequoyah: The Cherokee Man Who Gave His People Writing, written and illustrated by James Rumford, translated into Cherokee by Anna Sixkiller Huckaby (Houghton Mifflin).

The Carnegie Medal, established with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, honors an outstanding American video production for children released during the previous year. The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) administers the award. Paul R. Gagne and Melissa Reilly of Weston Woods Studios, producers of The Dot in association with FableVision, are the 2005 recipients of this year's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children's Video. The video is based on the book by Peter H. Reynolds and is narrated by Thora Birch, with music by Jerry Dale McFadden.

Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, was named the winner of the 2005 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the most outstanding children's book originally published in a foreign language and subsequently translated into English for publication in the U.S. for The Shadows of Ghadames. Originally published in French in 1999 as Les Ombres de Ghadamès, the book was written by Joëlle Stolz and translated into English by Catherine Temerson.

Two Batchelder Honor Books also were selected:

• The Crow-Girl: The Children of Crow Cove, written by Bodil Bredsdorff and translated by Faith Ingwersen (Farrar Straus Giroux), and
• Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi, written by David Chotjewitz and translated by Doris Orgel (Richard Jackson Books, an imprint at Simon & Schuster's Atheneum division).

Russell Freedman, author of outstanding nonfiction for children and young adults, will deliver the 2006 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. Each year, an individual of distinction in the field of children's literature is chosen to write and deliver a lecture that will make a significant contribution to the world of children's literature.