Winners to Attend Celebration of Bookselling

All seven winners of this year's Indies Choice Book Awards will participate in next month's Celebration of Bookselling at BookExpo America. The May 26 lunchtime event, sponsored by Baker & Taylor, celebrates the relationship between indie booksellers and the titles they most enjoyed handselling during the past year.

Past Celebrations have been a highpoint of the show, and this year's event promises to continue that tradition. There's still time for two booksellers at each ABA member store to come help fete this year's Indies Choice winners:

• Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone (Knopf) -- Adult Fiction
• David Grann, The Lost City of Z (Doubleday) -- Adult Nonfiction
• Kathryn Stockett, The Help (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam) -- Adult Debut
• Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (Scholastic) -- Young Adult
• Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me (Wendy Lamb Books) -- Middle Reader
• Jerry Pinkney, The Lion and the Mouse (Little, Brown) -- New Picture Book
• Kate DiCamillo -- Most Engaging Author

Also celebrated at the event will be this year's Indies Choice Book Awards Honor recipients and the three inductees to the Picture Book Hall of Fame:

• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz (Atheneum)
• Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans (Viking)
• The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson (Viking)

The Celebration of Bookselling Lunch, from noon - 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 26, in the Javits Center's Special Events Hall, is free and open exclusively to two booksellers from each ABA member store. Booksellers who would like to attend should register individually as soon as possible via an electronic reservation form on Bookweb.org. Questions regarding the lunch should be addressed to Mark Nichols, ABA industry relations officer, at mark@bookweb.org.