Posted January 22, 2007.
Award-winning youth media books at the Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. Left to right: Fran Ware, Coretta Scott King Awards chair; Kathleen Horning, ALSC president; Leslie Burger, ALA president; and Judy Nelson, YALSA president. Credit: Curtis Compton, Cognotes.
Patron, Wiesner Win 2007 Newbery, Caldecott Medals
The writer of a novel about a 10-year-old girl named Lucky who lives in the California desert with her French guardian and the illustrator of a story about the images in a magical camera that washes up on a beach were named respective winners of the American Library Association’s Newbery and Caldecott medals honoring children’s literature. The announcement came January 22 at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, Washington.
Susan Patron earned the John Newbery Medal for The Higher Power of Lucky, published by Atheneum. The novel is populated with eccentric characters and quirky details that spice up Lucky’s life, just as her guardian Brigitte’s fresh parsley embellishes her French cuisine.
David Wiesner took the Randolph Caldecott prize for his masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered marinescapes in Flotsam, published by Clarion Books, that features such images as an octopus in an armchair holding story hour in a deep-sea parlor.
Sharon Draper, author of Copper Sun, and Kadir Nelson, illustrator of Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, earned Coretta Scott King Awards recognizing African-American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults. Draper’s book, published by Atheneum, tells the story of a 15-year-old African girl’s journey through American slavery. Nelson’s dramatic illustrations for Carole Boston Weatherford’s poetic tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape to freedom, published by Jump at the Sun, brings the era of the Underground Railroad to life.
Other awardees were:
- Laura McGee Kvasnosky, winner of the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for most distinguished beginning reader book, for Zelda and Ivy: The Runaways, published by Candlewick Press;
- Gene Luen Yang, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young-adult literature, for American Born Chinese, published by First Second;
- Lois Lowry, winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults;
- James Marshall, winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for a substantial and lasting contribution to children’s literature;
- Delacorte Press, winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the most outstanding children’s book translated from a foreign language, for Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s The Pull of the Ocean;
- Mo Willems, author, illustrator, and performer of Knuffle Bunny, produced by Weston Woods Studios, earned an Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s video; and
- Catherine Thimmesh, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Award for most distinguished informational book for children, for Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon, published by Houghton Mifflin.
A complete list of ALA award-winning books published during 2006 is found on the Public Information Office website.
Posted January 22, 2007.