YALSA Baker & Taylor Scholarship grants winners announced

CHICAGO – The Baker & Taylor Award Jury of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the fastest growing division of the American Library Association (ALA), is proud to announce that Christine Beaver and Dana Hutchins have won the YALSA Baker & Taylor Scholarship Grants for 2007. Each will receive a $1000 grant to attend the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., June 21 – 27, 2007.

The Baker & Taylor Scholarship is awarded for first-time attendance at an Annual Conference. The recipients must be members of YALSA and must have between one and 10 years’ experience working with teenagers.

Christine Beaver is the teen services librarian at the Hancock County Public Library in Greenfield, Ind. Beaver works closely with her local middle and high schools promoting individual books and also offers Fear Factor and Junk Food Jams as regular programs. Upon hearing that she had won the award, she exclaimed, “I was so excited about being a librarian already – now I’m so excited about going to ALA! I’m really going to enjoy working for the organization and making a difference.”

Dana Hutchins is the school librarian for Jackson Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, which serves over 1,000 6th to 8th graders. Hutchins has hosted young adult authors at her school and collaborates closely with the San Antonio Public Library for their Young Pegasus Poetry Contest. When she received the news that she had won the award, she said, “I’m completely overwhelmed. I’ve wanted to go to Annual for a long time and now I finally can!”

The YALSA Baker & Taylor Award Jury members who selected the winners are: Patsy L. Weeks, chair, Heart of Texas Literature Center, Brownwood, Texas; Wanda E. Jones, Martin Luther King Memorial Library, Washington, D.C.; Nancy Fredericks, Pasco County Library System, Hudson, Fla; Courtney L. Lewis, Wyoming Seminary Upper School, Kingston, Pa.; Carol Marlowe, Rahway Public Library, Rahway, N.J.

For more information, please contact the YALSA office. Applications are available through the YALSA website (www.ala.org/yalsa) and are due December 1st for the following year’s Annual Conference.

For 50 years, YALSA has been the world leader in selecting books, videos, and audiobooks for teens. For more information about these awards or for additional lists of recommended reading, go to www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists. For more information about YALSA, please contact us via e-mail, yalsa@ala.org; or by phone at 1-800-545-2433 ext. 4390.

YALSA Baker & Taylor Scholarship grants winners announced