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When most people think of the Newbery Award, they think of words, not art. After all, the Newbery criteria stipulate that “the committee is to make its decision primarily on the text. Other components of a book, such as illustrations, overall design of the book, etc., may be considered when...
It took only one book to make me hate all things Newbery. It was autumn 1975, and my sixth-grade teacher assigned us Paula Fox’s The Slave Dancer, which had won the Newbery Award the previous year. Set in 1840, the novel follows Jessie Bollier, a white thirteen-year-old boy kidnapped from...
Virginia Hamilton (left) and Mildred D. Taylor (right). Taylor photo: Jack Ackerman, The Toledo Blade. As a Black woman, African American children’s books scholar, and educator, I am dismayed that there have only been two Black women to win the Newbery Medal in its one hundred years. Virginia Hamilton was...
Hitty Preble — protagonist of the Newbery Medal–winning novel Hitty: Her First Hundred Years — is a doll with a history. Nothing is really known about her first hundred years, of course, but much has been written about her since. Her origin story was first told in the pages of...
In hindsight, it seems fitting that I would be contacted about the possibility of serving as chair of the 2021 John Newbery Award Selection Committee on the same day I attended a children’s literature conference in March 2019. At the time, I was a professor at Clemson University and had...
Ginny Moore Kruse in 1980, surrounded by some of the year's Newbery contenders. Photo: L. Roger Turner for the Wisconsin State Journal. From 1938 until 1980, the same committee (in various iterations) chose both the Newbery and Caldecott awards. In 1979 the ALSC membership voted to establish separate committees —...
Newbery Award titles are among the more visible of books for young readers. As such, they provide the opportunity to explore in microcosm a potential template that can be applied to the entire arena of books for children and teens. My book A Single Shard won the Newbery Medal in...
The Melchers at a Carnival of Books broadcast for the 1954 Newbery with winner Joseph Krumgold. Photo coutesy of the Melcher family. While my daughters and I are all avid readers who grew up enjoying award-winning children’s literature, we never had the opportunity to meet our relative, Frederic G. Melcher...
Board books don’t tend to win major awards. True, a handful have been named ALA Notable Children’s Books, including one of my all-time favorites, Global Babies by the Global Fund for Children. Many a Caldecott winner has later been republished in board book format, and some work well, notably Kevin...
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