Book Awards
Before I won the Newbery Medal, my dream had already come true. I was a published author. The quiet, melancholy stories I was always writing late at night, in my shared Brooklyn apartment, were turning into real-life books. The kind you could buy at a bookstore. Or check out from...
This is a plaque at Zoo Atlanta honoring Ivan, the western lowland gorilla who inspired The One and Only Ivan. (The young woman is Ariana Greenblatt, who played Julia in the movie.) Children from all over the world visit this spot because they know Ivan’s story. And they know his...
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...
Gantos with daughter Mabel after his Newbery win. Photo courtesy of Jack Gantos. I was very pleased to receive the Newbery Award and Scott O’Dell Award for Dead End in Norvelt. In the book, Miss Volker warned of the corrosive, anti-democratic tactics of fake news and advised Norvelters to beware...
I can only appreciate what winning the Newbery for Moon over Manifest means in the context of what it means to be a writer. And for me, writing is all about relationship. This may seem strange since writing is such a solitary endeavor. But it is fundamentally and profoundly relational....
“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...
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...
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....
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