Authors & Illustrators
“Well, now you know what the first line of your New York Times obituary is going to say,” said the journalist on the phone. I was mostly still asleep; I’d been up since 5:30 a.m., when my assistant woke me to tell me that people were trying to get a...
Immediate effects of the Newbery Award public announcement: scrotum references, scrotum jokes, questioning of scrotum relevance, and even overtures from a small, apparently well-meaning scrotum-related paraphernalia mail-order business (that included mouse pads and tote bags, among other items). A front-page article in the New York Times, and weeks on the...
Every now and then, I think about a conversation I had many years ago with one of my professors. We were talking about travel. He was saying how important he thought it was to venture beyond the main tourist paths. “You don’t even have to go very far,” he said....
As I write this, I am sitting in the home of my eighty-six-year-old mother. She may be living her last months on her own — soon my siblings and I will need to make decisions. I stay here every weekend with one or both of my Dobermans, try to spend...
DiCamillo with current Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden at the banquet, 2004. Photo courtesy of the American Library Association Archives. I grew up on a dead-end street in a small town in central Florida. In the summertime, I went everywhere barefoot, and my feet were so callused that I...
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...
That year, ALA Midwinter was in Philadelphia. It was very cold. I was very cold, too. Indeed, I had a bad case of the flu, the worst I have ever had. I had been invited to the conference — the only time in my career I have attended Midwinter. The...
Illustrations created by Karen Hesse for this essay. Illustrations: Karen Hesse. What do water and sunshine mean to a weed? I was a skinny, freckle-faced ghost of a child. I had friends up and down my city block, but I was the weed in the garden. Long walks on sweltering...
First of all, I’d like to address the Newbery-related questions I’m asked most frequently. No, the medal isn’t real gold. No, it’s too heavy to wear around my neck. No, it’s too small to frame and hang on the wall. Yes, winning it is one of the most important things...
306 articles
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