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Good Sunday morning! It is so good to be together with family, friends, and colleagues in Chicago. I am appreciative and honored to stand before you to respectfully accept the 2023 Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement as Practitioner. Past winners of this distinguished award include Dorothy L....
Photo: John Halpern. Thank you, American Library Association, for honoring my work with this incredible award. But, just to be clear, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award is for my previous body of work — correct? Because I’m not done yet! I have plans, ideas, and contracts, so, God willing, I...
I try to work on books that impact me personally. I was fortunate enough to illustrate Carole Boston Weatherford’s eloquent words and interpretation of the hymns that have been sung in African American community churches for what seems like centuries. I do not claim to have the same poetic abilities...
Clearly, I’m a very fortunate person. I’m blessed. I’ll never forget, and I’ll be forever grateful for, the phone call I received from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Jury. As any writer in this room would understand, Freewater was like my baby. So, the moment you know your baby...
I’d like to start by saying I’ve always been a better drawer than a writer. I’m also a better listener than a talker. So. Lucky you! I am here in this place once occupied by my heroes, artists whose work defined the visual vocabulary of my childhood with, as Marcia...
I’ll begin with gratitude. Thank you to the Newbery committee for recognizing Freewater. You read my work, connected with it, and judged it worthy, regardless of my debut status. To Laura Schreiber, the editor who plucked Freewater from an ever-flowing river of manuscripts. Laura immediately had vision and excitement for...
In the September/October 2018 Horn Book article “Devoted to Diversity: Publishers with a Purpose,” Shoshana Flax examined the landscape of publishing houses and imprints focusing on inclusive representation. That article recognized long-established publishers such as Just Us Books, Lee & Low Books, and Cinco Puntos Press and identified imprints, many...
Sandra Ríos Balderrama and Oralia Garza de Cortés began working together in 1986 to create what would become the Pura Belpré Award. The award was established ten years later (with the help of Linda Perkins and Toni Bissessar) for writers and artists whose work “portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino...
Langston Hughes. Underwood Archives/Contributor (Getty Images). Looking back to an incident during my middle-school years, I realize I’ve had the sensibilities of a scholar for a very long time. A student submitted a Langston Hughes poem to the school literary magazine as his own; the faculty sponsor did not know...
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