Booksellers & Authors Celebrated at ABA Luncheon

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On Tuesday, June 5, Valerie Koehler, the owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston and an ABA Board member, welcomed the audience of booksellers, authors, and publishers to the 12th annual ABA Celebration of Bookselling & Author Awards Luncheon, featuring the presentation of the 2012 Indies Choice Book Awards and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards.

Echoing the theme of ABA’s new video campaign,“Why Indies Matter,” Koehler told the audience: “Our enthusiasm and conviction as booksellers remain undiminished — even in ever-challenging times. And we are confident that as a bookselling community we, as independents, will continue to prosper and grow. Indies do matter.”

As at past Celebrations, this year’s winners and honor book recipients were invited to say a few words.

Tom Lichtenheld, illustrator of E.B. White Picture Book honoree Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site (Chronicle Books), said,  “One of my favorite things is to go to independent bookstores and meet the people and sign books... I can have a relationship with them. I know the store, I know the people, they know me, and there’s a consistency and an engagement there I don’t necessarily feel elsewhere.”

Author Kate Messner and illustrator Christopher Silas Neal, whose book Over and Under the Snow (Chronicle Books) was also a Picture Book honoree, met for the first time at this year’s celebration.

“Communities that have independent bookstores are lucky to have something that really creates a literary soul,” said Messner, a self-proclaimed “read-aloud fanatic,” who, as a child, would stalk her parents’ dinner guests with a stack of books, pleading to be read to. Messner learned about the secret world under the snow while on a field trip with her seventh grade students. “I was enchanted the whole rest of the day,” she said. “I’m so very grateful that you found that same sense of magic, too.”

Neal admitted, “I sort of drew myself as the father character because I hope to one day have a daughter that I can discover life’s hidden treasures with.”

Jon Klassen, winner of the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in the Picture Book category, for I Want My Hat Back (Candlewick Press), talked about his family road trips and how his dad and brothers wanted to stop at every bookstore they passed. “So every time my mom would speed up, we’d all be looking around for the bookstore.”

Carmen Agra Deedy, author with Randall Wright of The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale, illustrated by Barry Moser (Peachtree Publishers), was present to accept her honor award in the Middle Reader category.  Agra Deedy said she was turned on to reading at the age of eight by a “serene Apollonian librarian” who introduced her to a “life-changing book,” Charlotte’s Web. “And now my hands are shaking,” she said, “because full circle’s such a cool thing.”

Another Middle Reader honor recipient, Lauren Oliver, the author of Liesl and Po, illustrated by Kei Acedera (HarperCollins), thanked booksellers for providing “stairways on pages” for readers, because “at the darkest times of my life,” she said, “the only way out was taking refuge in a book and climbing my way out on its pages.”

In a surprising turn of events, voting for the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in the Middle Reader category ended in a tie this year between siblings Maile and Colin Meloy. Colin won the award for Wildwood (Balzer and Bray), but was not in attendance since he and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, were on deadline for their next book. Maile Meloy won for The Apothecary,  illustrated by Ian Schoenherr (Putnam Juvenile). Accepting her award, Meloy admitted that she and Colin thought they might have to fight to the death, a la Hunger Games, but was grateful not to have to, and thanked the audience for being “doubly generous” to her family.

An honor recipient in the Indies Choice Book Award Young Adult category, Marie Lu, author of Legend (Putnam Juvenile), was born in Beijing and said she learned English by spending time in her neighborhood bookstores. “Now, when I go to my local indie, it really feels like I’m coming home,” she said.

The winner of the Indies Choice Book Award in the Young Adult category, Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Gray (Philomel), said, “I wrote this book, but it’s not my story. History wrote this story.” When she first told people the subject of her book — a Lithuanian girl starving at a work camp under Stalin’s reign — and that it was a book for kids, their response was, Good luck with that,” she said. “But I needed more than luck. I needed an agent and a publisher and independent booksellers who believe that history is important.” She thanked the audience for handselling her book, and when customers picked up  “the wrong Shades of Gray,” for gently taking it out of their hands and saying, “Take totalitarianism, not titillation!”

An honor recipient in the category of Adult Nonfiction, Andre Dubus III, author of Townie (W.W. Norton), said, “My favorite people in this country are public school teachers, nurses, librarians, and independent booksellers. Public school teachers for nurturing our children, nurses for nurturing our bodies, librarians for nurturing our communities, and you imperiled — but, hopefully, not imperiled for long because you’re tough and resilient  — independent booksellers for nurturing our very cultural souls.”

Gabrielle Hamilton, the Indies Choice winner for Adult Nonfiction for Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House), took the stage, immediately pointing out that after years of working in catering, she was used to putting together the box lunches that the audience was currently enjoying. To be on the other side was “f***ing awesome,” she said.

Accepting his honor award in the Adult Debut category, Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility (Viking), said, “I find it to be the most discerning industry to be involved in... No one is more discerning than the people in this room. How careful you read. And how careful you recommend.”

Another Adult Debut honor recipient, Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men are Gone (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam), said she first got a sense of the world of bookselling at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association trade show. “You’ve been so good to me from one coast to the other,” she said.

Téa Obreht, the winner in the Adult Debut category for Tiger’s Wife (Random House), admitted to developing destructive habits during the solitary process of writing, such as reciting dialogue aloud, even when others were in earshot. “Then the people in this room read it and became the first inhabitants of this world besides me,” she said.  “And in your bookstores, with your tremendous generosity and support, you invite other people to become inhabitants of this world, and you fuse this crazy thing we’re trying to create out of nothing with the real world.”

Honor recipient for Adult Fiction Simon Van Booy, author of Everything Beautiful Began After (Harper Perennial), told the audience of booksellers, “Thank you for helping me make a life and a living. I really deeply appreciate it.”

Another honor recipient, Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), mentioned that her Mississippi community had lost its independent bookstore, Pass Christian Books, in Hurricane Katrina. As she has been traveling to promote her book, she has seen that bookstores truly are the “cultural and social centers of communities,” Ward said. “I’m really looking forward to the day our community has our independent back.”

Upon taking the stage, the winner in the Adult Fiction category, Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), said, “The Pulitzer Board couldn’t get it together this year, but Indies Choice had no problem.” This being his third novel, Eugenides said he noticed something different this time around: critics began talking less of the book, and more of the person who wrote it.

“You feel this odd sense that your book is being deformed,” he said. “The only cure for that, I found, was to go out into the country and talk to people in independent bookstores....That’s where I felt finally that my book was being read.” It’s like Medieval Europe, he continued, “moving from monastery to monastery and finding the faithful in these walled enclosures where they’re keeping the life of knowledge alive and having some excellent Belgian-style beer in the basement.”

M.T. Anderson, most known for his Octavian Nothing series (Candlewick Press), is an honoree for Most Engaging Author. He addressed the audience, saying, “You people are the merchants of dreams, of faiths, of beginnings, and ends. At this point, our fates are tied together with yours, so don’t be afraid to call on us as discussions are happening about the future of bookselling. We are there for you.”

John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton Juvenile), and another honoree for Most Engaging Author, explained why the authors in attendance have been so nice to booksellers throughout the celebration. “It’s not just because we are here and you are here and it would be awkward if we weren’t nice to you, but we’re nice for the same reason Republicans are nice to billionaires. We need you.”

The winner for Most Engaging Author was Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder (Harper Perennial) and owner of Parnassus Books  in Nashville, Tennessee. Over the past year, the author-turned-bookseller has shown her unwavering support of indies through various media outlets, and gave an inspiring keynote at January’s Winter Institute. Patchett began her acceptance speech, “Brothers and sisters, I need a favor,” calling on the members of the audience to help promote Calling Invisible Women, by Jeanne Ray, her mother, who is unable to tour due to a recent surgery.

“I wanted to give you a present, so bear with me,” Patchett said, setting the scene: “The Javits Center becomes Agincourt. We become English. Amazon and the Department of Justice become French. I become Henry V.”

Patchett recited Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V, wherein the title character inspires his much outnumbered English forces to fight the French. “This is the very best example I know of the little guy winning,” said Patchett, who received a standing ovation for her performance.

Following the Celebration, 20 of the participating authors — all of them 2012 E.B. White Read-Aloud or Indies Choice award winners or honor recipients — joined indie booksellers for a special reception and signing in the ABA Booksellers Lounge (Room 1E07/08 of the Javits Center).