The awards are out! Seventy-one American Library Association Youth Media awards and twenty-eight Sydney Taylor Book awards by the Association of Jewish Libraries were announced within the past week. Combined with last fall’s National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature, that makes a grand total of 104 awards and honors for children’s books, audiobooks, visual media, and adult books with crossover teen appeal.
We’re celebrating the wonderful winners, and doing that happy/sad dance you do while appreciating those and shedding a few tears for some of our favorites that didn’t get a nod. With a field as rich in talent as ours, the books that don’t get awards can truly take your breath away. Last year, author Kate Messner wrote a poem for children’s book writers and illustrators, a comforting read if you didn’t win (and a lagniappe if you did).
Since the full award lists are readily available online (ALA Youth Media Awards here and AJL Sydney Taylor Book Awards here and the National Book Awards for YPL here, I like to present the results for my colleagues in the bookselling and publishing worlds a little differently.
Last year, I looked at the Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz awards by gender — and I suspect folks will be discussing that topic some more, given this year’s numbers (nine men, three women for those three awards, which includes a clean male sweep for the Caldecotts), and also at the 2011 awards by publisher. I’m repeating the latter breakdown for this year’s awards, because I like to take a look at these things and think it will interest you folks, too.
There are still children’s book awards yet to be announced this year, including the Boston-Globe Horn Book Awards and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, among others. We’ll keep you posted on those, as well.
Before we get to the publisher breakdown, here’s a shout out to a few children’s book creators whose work received multiple awards:

• Susan Goldman Rubin took home three awards: the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers, a YALSA finalist nod for Music Was IT: Young Leonard Bernstein (Charlesbridge) and a Sydney Taylor Notable citation for Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto (Holiday House).
• Thanhha Lai won both the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a Newbery Honor for her book, Inside Out & Back Again (Harper).
• John Corey Whaley’s Where Things Come Back (Atheneum) won the Printz Award and the Morris Award.
• Kadir Nelson won both the King Author Award and the King Illustrator Honor for Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans (Balzer + Bray)
• Albert Marrin‘s Flesh So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Knopf) was both a National Book Award YPL finalist and a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Older Readers.
• Maggie Stiefvater was awarded a Printz Honor and an Odyssey Honor for The Scorpio Races (Scholastic).
• Eric A. Kimmel won two Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Younger Readers citations, for The Golem’s Latkes, illustrated by Aaron Jasinski (Marshall Cavendish) and Joseph and the Sabbath Fish, illustrated by Martina Peluso (Kar-Ben).
• Gary D. Schmidt‘s Okay for Now (Clarion) was both a National Book Award YPL finalist and an Odyssey Honor Book.
• Guadalupe Garcia McCall won the Pura Belpré Award and was a Morris finalist for her book, Under the Mesquite (Lee and Low).

I will post the full breakdown of awards by publisher in the next blog post, but here is the quick-and-dirty publisher summary. (Please note that some of these numbers include multiple awards for a single title.)
Random House – 18 (5 for Knopf, 3 for Schwartz & Wade, 3 for Listening Library, 2 for Crown, 2 for Delacorte, 2 for Doubleday, 1 for Tricycle)
Macmillan Group – 11 (3 for FSG, 3 for Henry Holt, 4 for Roaring Brook, 1 for Bloomsbury)
HarperCollins – 9 (2 for HarperCollins, 2 for Balzer + Bray, 2 for HarperTeen, 1 for Amistad, 1 for Ecco, 1 for Greenwillow)
Lerner – 7 (6 for Kar-Ben, 1 for Graphic Universe)
Simon & Schuster – 7 (or 5 if you don’t count Ashley Bryan and Susan Cooper’s lifetime achievement awards as S&S awards) (4 — or 2 — for Atheneum, 1 for S&S BFYR, 1 for Free Press, 1 for Simon Pulse)
Candlewick Press – 5
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – 5 (3 for Clarion, 2 for Houghton Mifflin)
Penguin – 5 (2 for Dial, 2 for Viking, 1 for Philomel)
Lee & Low – 4 (3 for Lee & Low, 1 for Children’s Book Press)
Scholastic – 4
Hachette – 3 (all for Little, Brown)
Charlesbridge – 3
Boyds Mills Press -2 (both for Calkins Creek)
Cinco Puntos Press – 2
Disney – 2 (both for Hyperion)
Holiday House – 2
Marshall Cavendish – 2
National Geographic Society – 2
And one apiece for Abrams, Artscroll/Mesorah, Brilliance Audio, Eerdmans, Gale/Sleeping Bear Press, House of Anansi/Groundwood, Jewish Lights, Lethe Press, Walker & Co., and Weston Woods Studios.
Congratulations, everyone!!
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Readers, which of these books have you read and loved? Which ones do you recommend to all of us, your fellow confirmed children’s book devourers?
P.S. From Paul O. Zelinsky comes this wonderful little tidbit of information: “Stephen Colbert will be interviewing Maurice Sendak on his show in two parts, tomorrow and Wednesday evenings.” Wahoo! Thanks for the heads-up, Paul!