Thank you so much to the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards committee for selecting The Waiting Place for this honor and for recognizing our work. I especially want to thank Dina for entrusting me with such an important task. Her love, commitment, energy, and confidence in our mission influenced me from the beginning in a very positive way.

I am very happy to have met Matin, Mobina, Setareh, Shabnam, Yusuf, and Kosar; Shokrieh, Ahmad, Hashmat, and their older sister; and the unnamed girls and their families, and grateful that they welcomed us into their lives. My purpose was always to photograph children being children, doing the things that children do, yet it was certainly not difficult to see the pain in their eyes. These children, or any children, do not deserve to experience what they did before and during their time at the camp, and I wonder what will become of them now.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2022 BGHB Nonfiction winners.]

Thanks to this award, I hope that this book will reach as many families as possible. I would like to dedicate this award to all the children of today and the adults of tomorrow. Thank you very much.]

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2022 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB22. Read more from The Horn Book by and about Anna Bosch MIralpeix.