Dear friends:

Our Boston Globe-Horn Book celebration came to an end this week, but go ahead and treat yourself to the panoply of interviews and selfies provided by our winners. God bless ’em, and may next October find us live once again at Simmons with all the winners and guests, whomever they may be. As ever, you’ll find the winners’ and honorees’ acceptance speeches, along with the judges’ introductory remarks, in the January/February issue of The Horn Book Magazine, which will feature original cover art by this year’s Picture Book winner Oge Mora.

Here’s a little preview of my not-yet-thought-through, never-mind-written, January/February editorial: the three winners of the top Fiction, Nonfiction, and Picture Book are all Black. Obviously, that fact alone is terrific for so many reasons, but it takes me back to my college study of the Harlem Renaissance with Sue Houchins and the much-missed Agnes Jackson at Pitzer (Sue is now at Bates). Short version: a Black Renaissance is what we are having in books for young people today, and let’s honor that.

Trudging a few years on in the chronology, I was on the Best Books for Young Adults (as it was then called) committee for (as it is now called) YALSA in 1983, and I think I can fairly say that the book the committee loved most was Walter Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit. We will finish the Netflix series tonight, I hope, but Richard and I are both into it. Much of the dialogue is straight from the novel, and the characters are pretty much as I remember them. (Unlike the Emilia Fox-Charles Dance-Diana Rigg-FAYE DUNAWAY Rebecca, which I recently watched thanks to some bad advice from Datalounge. UGH. I won’t go on.)

Oh, and I was right to make my birthday book The Searcher, Tana French’s latest. The weather alone—a dank Irish autumn—makes the book worth it, and there’s a scene in an Irish pub where the deadpan narration of the conversations within cracked me up.

Love/Irish Goodbye,

Roger