Honor Books Research Articles

“Hope, but also Danger”: A Conversation with Larissa Lai on not Going Back and the ‘Re’ of Recuperation

Larissa Lai is a poet, fiction writer and academic who holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary, where she directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing. She has authored nine books. Her most recent works are The Tiger Flu, Iron Goddess of Mercy and The Lost Century. She is a recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book. She was recently awarded a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva in Spain and has been actively engaged in cultural organizing, experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the 1980s. Her work often explores themes of identity intertwined with elements of science fiction and the fantastical imagination. This interview took place in Parque García Sanabria on 24th March 2023 during a visit of Larissa Lai to the University of La Laguna. This interview focuses on the convergence of history, myth and affects, providing a reflection on the circularity of time and the promise of happiness.

Invited Article: The Honor List of 2022 Prize-Winning Young Adult Books: Family Stories in Ya Literature

In each of the five 2022 recommended honor books, the protagonist seeks to weave themselves into the tapestry of their family histories in order to emerge with an understanding of their future, both as an individual and as a member of a collective.

“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

“mouth full & dripping with language”: The 2022 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Amy Fish (bio), Krystal Howard (bio), and Carol-Ann Hoyte (bio) Winner: Elhillo, Safia. Home Is Not a Country. Make Me a World, 2021. Honor Books: Grimes, Nikki. Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2021. LaRocca, Rajani. Red, White, and Whole. Quill Tree Books, 2021. Luby, Brittany. Mii maanda ezhi-gkendmaanh/This Is How I Know. Illustrated by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, Translated by Alvin Ted Corbiere and Alan Corbiere, Groundwood Books, 2021. In her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2021, Tracy K. Smith writes, “poetry—the best poems of this rough year—courageously named so much of what I felt myself to be witnessing and enduring. . . . [and] reached me as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance” (xxiii). As the judges this year explored the many works published for young readers, we were struck by the way these picture books, poetry collections, and verse narratives bore witness to the difficulties and beauties of the world. Each of the books the judges chose engages in a kind of witnessing of the past and its impact on the present. The winner and honor books for this year feature the experiences of young people of color coming to terms with their familial and cultural histories and engaging with their fore-mothers, [End Page 315] grandmothers, and mothers. “One of the many things I love about poetry,” U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón writes, “is that it’s slippery; it can move in between worlds, it doesn’t have to offer clarity or hope or vision, it only has to make us pay attention to the world.” While many of the works for young readers that we surveyed this year did provide hope in a traditional sense, many did not but instead brought to light painful memories and histories to be witnessed by readers. Limón goes on to say that, “Right now, when so much of the world is full of chaos and suffering, poetry can ground us again and remind us that beauty and wonder and imagination matter. We need to be reminded that awe is essential to our human lives.” Embodying not only endurance, these works invoke awe through their language, music, and imagination.1 Our winner this year is Safia Elhillo’s debut verse novel for young readers, Home Is Not a Country. A fresh take on the YA verse novel, Home Is Not a Country employs the fantastic to explore struggles with race, identity, and culture experienced by the young protagonist Nima. In a recent essay, “Searching for the Words to Describe Myself,” Elhillo, who self identifies as an Arabophone Black person, describes Nima as “a hyphenated American whose origins are a country not named in the book, but which I base on Sudan. The book’s cover art is a photograph of the Sudanese-Somali ceramicist Dina Nur Satti, a Black woman.” An early poem in the verse novel, “My Name,” weaves English and Arabic as Nima attempts to describe herself: nima well really it’s ni’mamispronounced at school to sound likethe middle of the word animal or stretchedinto a whining neema no letter in englishfor the snarling sound that centers my nameits little growl ع (15) Affectionately nicknamed “nostalgia monster” (14), Nima immerses herself in songs and photographs from her parents’ youth while feeling increasingly alienated from her own life and identity. By wishing herself away, Nima conjures the ghost of her alternative self, Yasmeen. While Nima wears her own skin with painful awkwardness—“muttering & burdened by the shadow of an accent/that i cannot manage to make charming” (9)—Yasmeen is a glamorous fantasy, “mouth full and dripping with language/. . . ./jewel of the neighborhood & somehow/a little taller than me/like there are extra bones in her spine” (12–13). This specter self whisks Nima into a city resembling Khartoum during the early days of her mother’s pregnancy—a pregnancy that could result in the birth of either Nima or Yasmeen. In Nima’s fantastical journey, confronting the past means reckoning with alternative futures...

Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial ed. by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl

Reviewed by: Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial ed. by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl Kara K. Keeling (bio) Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial. Edited by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl. Routledge, 2022. The subtitle of this anthology caught my eye when I first picked it up: "Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial." The claim that Newbery Medal winners would need "rediscovery" seemed curious, for what books are more canonical and well known than those judged each year as "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children"? Bookstores and libraries highlight them in displays, gold medals shining on their covers. Yet the need for such rediscovery, specifically by children's literature scholars, is exactly the claim that Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl persuasively make in the introduction to the volume as they show how much Newbery winners have been ignored in terms of critical evaluation within the academy. Their essay examines the reasons behind this scholarly neglect, [End Page 230] a complex set of circumstances that reflect the ongoing divisions between the "bookwomen" of publishers, booksellers, librarians, and educators of the early- and mid-twentieth century who enshrined the award, and the academic professionals who sidelined children's literature as an area of study until the 1970s, then, as the field gained respectability within the academy, focused first on fairy tales, fables, and Golden Age books as "Literature." Schwebel and Van Tuyl note that while some Newbery winners have received marked critical attention, because of reader popularity and common curricular presence, one third have virtually no extant scholarship on them at all, perhaps because, they theorize, many of the books are "middle-aged": "too new to have the status of Golden Age classics, too old to have been widely read by generations of scholars in the field since the 1970s" (6). As Schwebel and Van Tuyl argue, these unexamined Newbery Medal books are "ripe for attention" on the occasion of the award's centennial, and this critical volume works well to make up for previous disregard (6). The fourteen essays comprising the rest of the book examine novels from every decade since the award's inception, with greater attention to winners from the first three decades of its existence to make up for greater past critical neglect of that era: three essays on books from the 1920s, one from the 1930s, three from the 1940s, and one from each of the subsequent seven decades. Schwebel and Van Tuyl make the point that the Newbery Medal committees' unspecific criterion of literary "excellence" has resulted in a list, over the course of the century, that is predominantly "White in terms of characters, authors, and attitudes" (7). The winning books selected for evaluation within this anthology, however, represent more diversity in terms of cultural identity than a casual glance over the list of Medal-winning titles might lead one to expect. The essays in this volume reveal that older Newbery-winning authors created unexpected portrayals of diverse characters—sometimes revealing and sometimes interrogating assumptions about race, class, and gender in surprising ways. It would be easy to expect an anthology of essays on disparate children's books written over most of a century to have little cohesion beyond the Newbery Medal that each story won, but Schwebel and Van Tuyl through careful editing—and, one suspects, directives to their contributors—have assembled a set of essays that work closely together. Writers within this anthology carefully contextualize their discussions within the Newbery tradition as a whole, especially the authors who examine how early patterns became established in the 1920s. Contributors show the broader historical context surrounding their focal text by examining the socioeconomic forces of the decade it was written and prized in, and how those influences affected the authors in writing their stories as well as the reception of the books by those who shaped the market for children's books, such as publishers, librarians, and teachers. The contributors also frequently make connections [End Page 231] between their focal text and earlier or later Newbery winners and honor books...

Bragging Rights and the Newbery

In an article in the Spring 2022 issue of Children and Libraries, celebrating the centennial of the Newbery Medal, author Steven Herb provided an intriguing statistical examination of Newbery Medal and Honor Books and their creators. In addition, the author wished for a “country and state-by-state birth distribution.”

Newbery Metrics: The Newbery and the Illustrators

I began reading Newbery Medal and Honor Books in elementary school, so I have been aware of the award for nearly three quarters of the life of children’s literature’s most famous prize. Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes (1944) was an early favorite of mine, probably because of the Boston setting and Johnny’s painful adventure with molten silver.ErratumWe regret the omission of Grace Lin from the “Double Dipping” list on page 24. Grace is also a member of this exceptional group of author-illustrators who have garnered both Newbery and Caldecott recognition. She received a 2010 Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and a 2019 Caldecott Honor for A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Congratulations, Grace!

From Runners-Up to Honor Books: A History of the Books with the Silver Medal

If you ever talk to a member of the Newbery Committee some time in December, as they are approaching the final discussions to choose the Newbery winner, chances are you will find them stressed out, still frantically reading, and worried they may miss a distinguished book—perhaps THE most distinguished book of the year.

A Compilation of Our Contributors’ Favorite Newbery Books

Choosing one’s favorite Newbery is like choosing a favorite child . . . but here are some favorites of our CAL contributors.The 1996 Honor Book The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. I marvel at this book, which deftly moves from hilarity to despair and then to an emerging sense of connection as a way forward. I also love Flora and Ulysses (2014), which was the book that won the year I was on the Newbery Committee. I love so many of the books!—Susan Polos, Middle School Librarian, Greenwich Country Day School

A Book’s Long Journey: How Librarians Aided One Author’s Award-Winning Research

Nancy Churnin’s Dear Mr. Dickens won this year’s National Jewish Book Award and was named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. Here she recalls her journey researching the book—and how librarians were pivotal to her research. Here, in her own words, Churnin shares her story from research to publication.

AN APPEARANCE OF A SEASONABLE SILVER LINING WITHIN THE DUO INTERSPECIES RELATIONSHIPS: A RELATIVE REVIEW

This paper rests on how the two bestseller horror novels chosen to compare actually connect to each other. It reviews twin interspecies relationships. The first one is a young adult debut novel The Silver Kiss (2009) by English born American author Annette Curtis Klause. It was published in 1990 and republished in 2009 with two additional short stories, “The Summer of Love” and “The Christmas Cat.” Michigan Library Association picked it as the ‘Best Book of the Year Honor Book‘ in 1990. School Library Journal too gave it place among the Best Books in the same year and American Library Association, in 1991, considered it among the Best Books for Young Adults. The other is also a debut work Let the Right One In (original Swedish: Lat denratteKomma in), also known as Let Me In (2004). It is a vampire fiction novel written by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist and translated by Ebba Segerberg into English (2008).The subject of both the works taken into consideration here is loss, relationships and vampires. ‘Species’ means type or class of individuals sharing common characteristics, whereas inter-species means taking place between species. The Silver Kiss unfolds the tale of the teenager heroine Zoe’s life, taking into account her mother’s battle with cancer and death. She is very courageous, but all alone. She is in need of someone who can hold her in sleepless nights. Late one night, she takes a walk around the garden where she meets the dashing and silver haired Simon. He realizes the agony of desolation and death and Zoe’s pensive contemplation of her sinking mother. Both of them become reconciled to emotional loss via their budding inter-relation and are strongly concerned for each other. Let the Right One In revolves around the affinity betwixt Oskar Eriksson, who is twelve years of age and an age-old vampire in the figure of Eli who also happens to be a child. Oskar is all the time teased in school by a bunch of bullies, who take pleasure in inflicting severe pain and shame upon him. With Eli’s support, he is able to retaliate against his cuss harassers. A distinctive impression of vampirism has been created by both Klause and Lindqvist together. Connectively, the inferno strikes one with all the returning warmth. Details of the figures’ everyday lives have been shared with the readers appealingly. Initially, the whole lot of selves give the impression of being unattached, after all they come to be interrelated before long. By-and-large, the novels under discussion in this place are manifold and come up with the matters in question for the reviewers to ponder over.
 
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Shaping Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Authors and Paratextual Features of USBBY Outstanding International Books, 2006–2019

AbstractThis article contributes to research on equity in award‐winning and honor books by offering a paratextual analysis of 14 immigration‐themed young adult books that were included on the USBBY Outstanding International Books list between 2006 and 2019. Findings reveal that paratexts—all parts of a book excluding the narrative—frame authors who are not members of the cultures they describe as having authority to tell immigration stories through authors’ sociocultural proximity to real events and people who experienced migration. However, other paratextual features, such as titles, covers, and author interviews, reveal ideological problems in some authors’ didactic purposes for telling immigration stories and disproportionately depict migration in terms of escape and rescue. For educators, this article invites a reconsideration of text selection processes relative to an author’s background in connection to immigration and offers ideas for how teachers and their students might think critically about authorship.

In Conversation with Beverley Naidoo: On Crossing Boundaries through Reading and Writing

Beverley Naidoo has written novels, picturebooks, short stories, two plays (stage and radio), and adult nonfiction. Her new novel Children of the Stone City, will be published in 2022. Her early works were written in exile in the UK but set in her birth country South Africa, with banned there until 1991. Her PhD (1992) investigated the potential for challenging racism through reading literature in school. After South Africa's 1994 "transition" Naidoo turned to writing about children from other African countries, as in , Carnegie Medal), its sequel and , Children's Africana Honor Book Award).

From Whitman to Hugo: An interview with Brian Selznick

‘Walt Whitman loved words’. So begins Barbara Kerley’s and Brian Selznick’s Walt Whitman: Words for America (2004), a biography of the American poet for young readers that has been recognized as a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book. Kerley and Selznick trace the poet from his beginnings as a printer’s apprentice to his volunteer work as a nurse during the American Civil War; and from the young Walt poring over the pages of Arabian Nights and Ivanhoe to his own creative output being interpreted as the voice of his nation. Like all of Selznick’s books, Walt Whitman is illustrated with precise, evocative drawings for all ages. The New York Times bestselling author and illustrator returns to the poet with his latest, Live Oak, with Moss (2019). Among Selznick’s many other popular books for children are The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and Wonderstruck (2011) (covers available at https://www.thebrianselznick.com/books.htm). These two works have now been adapted into award-winning films by Martin Scorsese (2011) and Todd Haynes (2017), respectively.

A Postcolonial Study on the Cultural Predicaments in Dragonwings

Dragonwings , the first Chinese American novel written by Laurence Yep, wins Newbery Honor Book in 1976. In light of the domestic and foreign research findings, it can be found that not so much importance has been attached to analyzing Moon Shadow’s cultural predicaments in Dragonwings . Based on the post-colonialism, this paper is to focus on systematically analyzing the influencing factors on Moon Shadow’s cultural predicaments in America and providing inspirations for those who are confusing about their cultural predicaments under the circumstance of globalization.

"For the Undefeated": The 2020 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

"For the Undefeated":The 2020 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Krystal Howard (bio), Catherine Kyle (bio), and Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino (bio) Winner: Kwame Alexander. The Undefeated. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson. Versify, 2019. Honor Books: Nikki Grimes. Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir. WordSong, 2019. Aida Salazar. The Moon Within. Scholastic, 2019. Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond, editors. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. Seven Stories P, 2019. Though many of the works of poetry published for young readers in 2019 were imaginative, engaging, and delightful, a few stood out as particularly excellent contributions to the larger field. Written by both veteran and debut poets, these works—picture books, memoirs in verse, verse novels, and collections of voices for all ages—by and large sought to bear witness to our unique moment in history, and to celebrate, in the words of our winner, "the undefeated." The poetry published in 2019 was part of a larger project undertaken by poets seeking to reflect upon and recover histories, cultures, traumas, and triumphs of the past. Speaking of the blurry line between poetry and politics, Major Jackson asserts in his introduction to The Best American Poetry 2019 that "poets today write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance in American poetry. They heed the ethical imperative to [End Page 317] bear witness, to speak out, to advocate for social and economic equality, to combat the forces of various '-isms,' yet not at the expense of artful language or a loyalty to self—a duality of purpose that is consistent from generation to generation" (xxviii–xxix). While Jackson's comments are focused specifically on poets writing for adults, his assessment holds true for poets writing for young readers as well, who—as is evidenced by the works published this year—are very clearly working in that same rich tradition of resistance. Our winner this year is Kwame Alexander's The Undefeated, a powerful poem—an ode in picture book form—illustrated by Kadir Nelson in his signature figurative-style oil paintings against white backgrounds. Winner of the 2020 Caldecott Medal and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, as well as a Newbery Honor, The Undefeated is striking not only narratively and visually, but also poetically. The poem makes use of anaphora, intertextuality, repetition, imagery, and lyricism, examining the African American experience throughout history and into the present moment. It is, as the book's dust jacket proclaims, "a love letter to America. To black America," creating a woven tapestry and celebration of Black history, resilience, and joy. This love letter, as both a poem and a picture book, aches to be read aloud–a plea which is not lost on Alexander, who includes a link to an audio version of the poem on the copyright page. Across the book as a whole and within individual double-page spreads, Alexander's poetry and Nelson's images create a collage of the past and present. Many of Nelson's illustrations are literal collages of notable figures from Black history and culture, as when artists and writers such as Romare Bearden, Zora Neal Hurston, Phillis Wheatley, and Langston Hughes mingle across two pages. The figures are identified in The Undefeated's substantive paratextual material, which provides details about the people and events depicted in the book's pages. Alexander's poetry similarly pulls together the writings of Black figures, highlighting this intertextuality through the use of italics and capitalization. He utilizes words from Frantz Fanon made famous during the Civil Rights Movement by Malcom X as he writes that the poem is for "the ones who survived / America / by any means necessary" (emphasis original), accompanied by an image of an unnamed family. Langston Hughes's poem "Weary Blues" is juxtaposed with Nelson's illustration of a Black Union soldier during the Civil War, one of The audacious oneswho carried the red, white, and Weary Blueson the battlefieldto save an imperfect Union. (emphasis original) The linkage of past to present is powerfully accomplished in three separate double-page spreads that each contain the phrase, "This is for the unspeakable." [End Page 318] Each spread...

The Legacy of Jane Goodall: Using Children's Literature to Teach about an Iconic Scientist

The Legacy of Jane Goodall:Using Children's Literature to Teach about an Iconic Scientist David Campos (bio) When I was a boy in the 1970s, I watched a National Geographic documentary about a young woman scientist who traveled from her native United Kingdom to live in the forests of Tanzania to learn about chimpanzees in their natural habitat. The documentary, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965), left me inspired by her unbridled enthusiasm. Indeed, Jane Goodall's lifelong passion for observing animals compelled her to leave the comforts of her home to live in the remote forest and study as much as she could about chimpanzees. For years throughout my schooling, I would think about Jane Goodall and wonder what had become of her. Without the aid and benefit of the Internet at that time, I was left speculating whether her adventurous quest proved valuable. Two decades later, I was teaching second grade. By happenstance, I found a videocassette of that documentary that had piqued my curiosity for the dedicated woman who had a penchant for observing and socially connecting with chimpanzees. I decided to show my students the documentary with the aim of introducing the living scientist and recognizing her contributions to primatology, while stimulating their inquisitive nature to pursue their own study of animals. At the time, children's books about Jane Goodall were not readily available, so I used encyclopedic entries that my students and I read together to learn more about her life work. Click for larger view View full resolution Indeed, the children's literature on Jane Good-all while I was growing up and available to me as a young public-school teacher was scarce. At the time it seemed nonexistent. Today, however, there is a wide range of children's books that teachers, librarians, and parents can use to offer insight into Goodall's legacy, such as the 2012 Caldecott Honor book Me…Jane (McDonnell; 2011). My goal in this article is to share how you can use these children's books as instructional tools to help students develop historical [End Page 79] knowledge about Jane Goodall and recognize her contributions to science. Through their reading endeavors, I expect that students can become inspired to pursue their own research or take action against injustice to animals or humans alike. Exploring the Lived Experiences of Jane Goodall through Children's Books There are many contemporary children's books on Jane Goodall. Plenty of them share the same elements of her inspiring story through salient pictures and photographs and powerful messages, leaving young readers with lasting impressions. The principal advantage of having a spread of books that recount these aspects of Goodall's life is that you can use the inherent text variations to scaffold instruction and support all learners. You can choose from these books to meet the unique needs of individual children predicated on different features. Reading levels: A range of publications exist, from a board book to picture and chapter books and a graphic novel. You can present the books first, allow the students to browse the content and text features, and then help them select ones that align with their reading level: not terribly hard or easy, but challenging enough. Preferences: Of course, students should be given the opportunity to select their own books. However, you may want to demonstrate how the presentation of content differs among them. You can compare the books composed of hand-painted pictures with those that display vivid photographs and those that offer differing mediums. The students can then select the books they favor based on the graphic representations they find appealing. Click for larger view View full resolution Reading purposes and interests: You can remind students that readers often have a purpose when they select books: to be entertained, to strengthen their understanding of a topic, or to learn a new skill, among others, not to mention a blend of these intentions. Moreover, you can emphasize that knowing their purpose enhances the reading experience. As all teachers and librarians can attest, when presenting books to children, certain factors certainly matter: the literary merit; the authenticity of the content; the unification of text, illustrations...

Focus IBBY

Focus IBBY Liz Page (bio) A Very Special Press Conference The Covid-19 pandemic is having an enormous effect on the IBBY schedule in 2020. The thirty-seventh IBBY World Congress, due to be held in Moscow, has been postponed until September 2021, book fairs have been turned into digital events, and many of our projects have been put on hold. The IBBY-Yamada projects that were reported in the previous issue of Bookbird have either taken place online or have been postponed to a later date. IBBY has also been innovating! The 2020 Bologna Book Fair press conference was held online. The conference was prerecorded, put together in Basel, and streamed on Monday, May 4. Nearly 3,000 people watched the conference on that day. After the event, each part of the conference was made into mini-clips that can be watched on the IBBY YouTube channel; they are still being viewed. The winners of the three 2020 IBBY awards were announced at the press conference by the jury presidents. Click for larger view View full resolution IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award 2020 The unanimous choice of the jury for the IBBY-Asahi Award 2020, Casa Cuna Cuenteros is a group of passionate volunteers who carry out reading and storytelling activities in a children's hospital in Buenos Aires. This group began to make storybooks available to many children and families, and regular storytelling sessions were held in various areas of the hospital. The stories they told were fun and inspired the children and adults alike. Soon enough, a change in attitude was noticed, and they saw many were enjoying reading and listening to stories. Active participation increased at all levels among people coming to the hospital, including the staff. They soon had a collection of books to read from and then even a small library at the hospital. The group has become known for their hard work and successes. They have been invited to provide training and workshops for volunteers as well as offer advice for the setting up of similar programs in other hospitals. The project has seen many heart-warming successes and has touched the lives of many children, teenagers, parents, families, and caregivers. It has also inspired many others to emulate it in other parts of the city and at other hospitals. www.casacunacuenteros.com Click for larger view View full resolution IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award 2020 The winners of the 2020 IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award are Marit Törnqvist from the Netherlands and Zhu Yongxin from China. Marit Törnqvist is a writer and illustrator who has developed reading programs for children that focus [End Page 86] not only on the story but also on the experience of reading and on encouraging children to narrate and illustrate their own stories. Zhu Yongxin is a well-known scholar who has devoted his life to continuous research and activities related to reading promotion, including training and programs for children in rural areas and children with special needs. www.marittornqvist.nl Click for larger view View full resolution Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2020 The winners of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award are Jacqueline Woodson of the United States as author and Albertine of Switzerland as illustrator. Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1963, and shortly thereafter moved with her mother and siblings to Greenville, South Carolina, where she spent much of her early formative years in the care of her maternal grandparents. At age seven she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she has since lived. In 2014, her autobiographical work Brown Girl Dreaming was the winner of the National Book Award and Coretta Scott King Award; it is also a Newbery Honor book. It is the centerpiece of her oeuvre, depicting her firsthand experiences of how African Americans were treated differently in the North and South, where her own path to becoming a writer is woven in with her life experiences. Woodson was a finalist for the 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Award and won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. After serving as Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador...

Navigating Award‐Winning Nonfiction Children's Literature

AbstractNonfiction children's literature has changed in recent years, including an increase in organizational, design, and text features. The authors conducted a content analysis of 112 nonfiction award‐winning and honor books from 2000 to 2018 to examine how the books have changed over time. The authors discuss the patterns, changes, and complexities found in nonfiction children's literature and provide text sets and guiding questions for classroom instruction and exploration of three features that appear in books in a variety of ways and may be challenging for students: atypical text, graphics with information, and supplemental expository information.

Prizing Children's Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children's Book Awards ed. by Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr

Reviewed by: Prizing Children's Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children's Book Awards ed. by Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr Quintin R. Bostic II (bio) Prizing Children's Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children's Book Awards. Edited by Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. New York: Routledge, 2017. Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas's study explores the prizing practices of children's literature in Australia, Canada, and the United States. As Kidd and Thomas note in the opening line of this anthology, "the prizing of children's books has a long history" (1). At least since the establishment of the Newbery Medal in 1922 and the Caldecott Medal in 1937, there has been ongoing debate in our field about the merits and value of literary prizing and the cultural ideologies that motivate the selection of award-winning children's books. Noting that there are now more than three hundred awards for English-language texts and authors, the editors explain that this collection was born out of their desire to advance professional conversations beyond individual prizes toward a broader examination of prizing. Kidd and Thomas's combined expertise on the subject is extensive and almost unrivaled among scholars of children's literature. Kidd's resume includes two often-cited (and award-winning) journal articles on the history and cultural politics of prizing in children's literature, and among Thomas's related work is his role as The Lion and the Unicorn's first Poetry Award Editor. The fourteen essays included in this volume offer perspectives on a range of literary prizes (their histories and functions), with particular attention focused on [End Page 338] English-language awards and many of the debates that surround them. The collection opens with what Kidd and Thomas title "A Prize-Losing Introduction." As its name suggests, the introductory essay is filled to the brim with the clever language, playful turns of phrase, and nuanced insights characteristic of the work of these two scholars. Across eighteen pages, the introduction outlines the history of prizing, some of the criticism and complexities that surround literary awards, the differences among prizes (and their function) for children's and adult literature, the rhetorics and ethos of prizing communities, and issues of identity and representation in awards. Although they note that "most of the contributors [to this volume] have mixed feelings if not strong doubts about prizing" (3), the editors concede that "for better and for worse, none of us is independent of prizing or its consequences" (10). The book is loosely organized into four major sections. The chapters constituting the first section "address[] the ideological work of prizes in enforcing norms and ideals beyond and alongside their stated purpose" (10). In "Prizing National and Transnational: Australian Texts in the Printz Awards," Claire Bradford demonstrates quantitatively the lack of diversity in Michael L. Printz Award winners and honor books from 2010 to 2014. After arguing that the Printz Award is dominated by winners from the United Kingdom and the United States, Bradford focuses her attention on the winning/honor books from Australia in order to explore the ways in which this award privileges some deployments of certain types of cultural references at the expense of others. Referencing James English's observation about the effect that children's literature awards have on sales figures, Bradford concludes her essay by underscoring calls for critical understandings of discourses about prizing the "best" books and the need to "be conscious and critical of how commercial systems influence the literary production and reception, and the role of prizing in these commercial systems" (30). Next, in "Prizing the Unrecognized: Systems of Value, Visibility, and the First World in International and Translated Children's Texts," Abbie Ventura builds upon Kidd's arguments about claims of universality by the Newbery Medal in order to examine prizes for translation (she touches on awards such as the Hans Christian Andersen Award, but focuses primarily on the Batchelder Award). Unique to Ventura's chapter is her use of data regarding the popularity of specific texts to support her argument that, ultimately, "more under dominant Western publishing trends, international is a limited and singular concept...

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

266 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. New York: Balzer & Bray--Harper Collins Publishers, 2017. 464 pp. ISBN: 978-0062498533. $18.99 Hardcover. Angie Thomas’s debut novel, released in February 2017, is a timely and wellexecuted book for young adult audiences. The strengths of Thomas’s novel are evidenced in her contemplation of culturally relevant themes like activism, police brutality, and code-switching, which unfold in a first-person, fast-paced narrative. The novel offers readers an engaging story that examines violence against black bodies, micro-aggressions, racism and non-violent protest movements like Black Lives Matter. The novel balances hard hitting moments with familiar cultural references that result in an authentic and genuine portrayal of the challenges of navigating two opposing worlds: white, elite private school, suburban life and an urban, black, close-knit but economically challenged community. The novel’s protagonist, Starr Carter, straddles two lives, her poor, black, and gang riddled neighborhood and the suburban, mostly wealthy, white prep school she attends. Starr keeps her two lives strictly divided, her school friends, including her white boyfriend, don’t meet her neighborhood friends and, likewise, her Garden Heights friends never meet her at the suburban Williamson Prep. All of that changes, however, when Starr witnesses the brutal murder of her childhood friend Khalil by a local police officer. The national news coverage, following real life trends, paints Khalil as a thug and drug dealer.While she grieves with the members of her community, her relationships with her Williamson Prep friends suffer. The local police force rallies around the officer, and the members of the Garden Heights community, angered by the lack of progress in Khalil’s murder investigation, take to the streets in protest. Through all of this, Starr struggles with her anger, fear, guilt and grief as the novel progresses, and she decides whether or not to come forward to testify before the grand jury on Khalil’s behalf. When discussed within the larger discourse of African-American popular culture texts, The Hate U Give would have benefitted most significantly from greater character development. There is a reliance on cliché and all too familiar tropes among the novel’s secondary characters. Other challenges include Thomas’ approach, which reflects moments of 90s nostalgia that many of today’s teens may dismiss as dated. Additionally, The Hate U Give mirrors the code-switching Starr frequently enacts at Williamson Prep, black-splaining rather than smoothly transitioningintocomplexdiscussionsof race.Whenexaminedbesideatextsuchas Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down, a novel in verse that successfully navigates topics of race and gun violence, Thomas’ novel could expand important discussions. Ibi Zoboi’s novel American Street, a National Book Award Finalist for youth literature, likewise tackles issues of race, police violence, and identity through strong and nuanced characters. CLA JOURNAL 267 Book Reviews At the same time, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give has been widely accepted, leading to the 2018 Morris Award for a debut author. The novel was on the National Book Award long list for youth literature and was a Coretta Scott-King and Michael L. Printz honor book. Timelessness is among the criteria for most of the Youth Media Awards, and given the novel’s first-person narrative voice, accessible language and subject matter, the reasons for the book’s accolades are clear. Ultimately, readers will find The Hate U Give an enjoyable introduction to conversations about police brutality and, arguably more importantly, how teens can become their own advocates and speak out against institutional oppression. Latrice Ferguson is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies Children’s Literature. She holds masters degrees in Library Science and Children’s Literature and is former librarian for the Chicago Public Library. ...