Schlitz, Selznick Win 2008 Newbery, Caldecott Medals

Holding the award-winning youth media books at the Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia are (from left): YALSA President Paula Brehm-Heeger, Coretta Scott King Book Award Committee Chair Deborah Taylor, ALA President Loriene Roy, and ALSC President Jane Marino.

The writer whose 21 monologues bring to life the world of 13th-century England and the illustrator of a 500-page picture book that pays homage to the flickering images of silent films were named respective winners of the American Library Association’s Newbery and Caldecott medals honoring children’s literature. The announcement, which took place January 14 at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, was webcast for those who could not attend.

Laura Amy Schlitz earned the John Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, published by Candlewick Press. In introducing readers to 21 young inhabitants of a medieval English village and manor—from Hugo, the lord’s nephew, to Nelly, the sniggler—the author draws back the curtain on the period and offers explanatory interludes that round out this historical and theatrical presentation.

Brian Selznick took the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the more-than 500-page interplay of wordless double-page spreads with pages text to tell the tale of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Published by Scholastic, the groundbreaking picture book follows the quest of the 10-year-old title character, an orphan who secretly lives in the walls of a Paris train station, as he labors to complete a mysterious invention left by his father.

Christopher Paul Curtis, author of Elijah of Buxton, and Ashley Bryan, who illustrated and wrote Let It Shine, earned Coretta Scott King Awards recognizing African-American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults. Curtis’s book, published by Scholastic, tells the story of 11-year-old Elijah and the Canadian community of escaped slaves in which he lives. Bryan’s meticulous attention to detail in Let It Shine, published by Atheneum, is evident in the accuracy of the musical notations for each of three spirituals for which he created double-page spreads of collage figures from bright-colored paper.

Other awardees were:

• Margarita Engle, author of The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, published by Holt, and Yuyi Morales, illustrator of Los Gatos Black on Halloween, written by Marisa Montes and published by Holt, are the respective winners of the Pura Belpré Award honoring Latino authors and illustrators whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in children’s books;
• Mo Willems, winner of the Theodor Geisel Award for most distinguished beginning reader book, for There Is a Bird on Your Head! published by Hyperion;
• Geraldine McCaughrean, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults, for The White Darkness, published by HarperTempest, an imprint of HarperCollins;
• Orson Scott Card, winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, for his novels Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow;
• VIZ Media, winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for most outstanding children’s book translated from a foreign language and subsequently published in the United States, for Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe and translated by Alexander O. Smith, originally published in 2003 as Bureibu Sutori;
• Kevin Lafferty (producer), John Davis (executive producer), Amy Palmer Robertson, and Danielle Sterling (co-producers), winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s video, for Jump In! Freestyle Edition;
• Peter Sis, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Medal for most distinguished informational book for children, for The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux;
• Live Oak Media, winner of the first-ever Odyssey Award for excellence in audiobook production, for Jazz.

A complete list of ALA award-winning books published during 2007 is found at ALA’s Public Information Office website.