{"id":24603,"date":"2018-02-13T07:30:32","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T12:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24603"},"modified":"2018-02-13T07:30:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T12:30:32","slug":"surprises-relief-and-some-questions-on-awards-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24603","title":{"rendered":"Surprises, Relief, and Some Questions on Awards Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0
\nThe big awards for the ALA Youth Media were announced\u00a0on Monday morning, and like\u00a0many of you, I was glued to the awards webcast. I did pretty well with some of my predictions, and completely missed others.
\nAward morning is a heart-in-your-throat time\u00a0for children’s book lovers.\u00a0Will your favorites get the recognition they deserve? Some books you know absolutely must win awards because, for one good reason or another, they\u00a0stand head and shoulders above the crowd. The\u00a0Girl Who Drank the Moon <\/em>by Kelly Barnhill was one of those books last year;\u00a0The Hate U Giv<\/em>e by Angie Thomas was one this year. Then there are books you have a deep and special love for but think might slide under the radar;\u00a0Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut<\/em> by Derrick Barnes and\u00a0Gordon C. James\u00a0was one of these for me.\u00a0I had loved the bright, alive, fresh\u00a0language and the gorgeous art; this book was unlike any other picture book of the year, a real standout, but since many of my colleagues hadn’t read it yet, I worried it might be similarly under-noticed by librarians. Not to worry. What a joy to see\u00a0Crown <\/em>sweep\u00a0four awards: Coretta Scott King Author Honor, King Illustrator Honor, Caldecott Honor, and Newbery Honor!
\nThen there are books that get big buzz early in the year.\u00a0This early buzz can be tricky; will\u00a0a whiz-bang January or February book seem like old news by award time the following winter? This was my worry for Jason Chin’s spectacular\u00a0Grand Canyon<\/em>, which\u00a0came out a full year ago.\u00a0I was ready to picket the ALA if\u00a0this book got overlooked by the Caldecott committee. With its incredible, beautiful detail and a gatefold spread that actually manages to convey the scope and grandeur\u00a0of the Grand Canyon (in a book! no small feat, my friends), this\u00a0picture book was absolute Caldecott material: distinguished, indeed. I am so relieved the committee kept it foremost in their minds through months of deliberations. We are delighted that Jason is a Vermonter, because now we get to bask in the reflected glory of that shiny medal. When I called Josie to tell her Jason had won the award, she reminded me that we had first met\u00a0him years ago when he\u00a0was a young bookseller\u00a0at Books of Wonder in NYC.\u00a0We’d loaded up on autographed books to send home to Vermont, and felt bad that\u00a0this really nice guy\u00a0had to search all over the back office for shipping forms. Little did we know then that the guy would turn out to be Jason Chin, and that he and his family would move to Vermont and bring illustrator glory to our little state. Congratulations, Jason!
\nI also worried about Deborah Heiligman’s fabulous Vincent and Theo<\/em>, which came out last April. Happily, the librarians also had long memories for this book, and it took home both the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award and a Printz Honor.
\nCongratulations to the full slate of award winners, who can all be found here<\/a>. It’s a great list of books!
\nSurprises:\u00a0Dan Santat’s awards-buzz picture book\u00a0After the Fall\u00a0<\/em>was\u00a0absent from the lists, which was a bit of a surprise since it won several Mock Caldecott awards. I completely missed reading Hello, Universe<\/em>, so the Newbery gold took me by surprise. I’m very much looking forward to reading it!\u00a0There were some surprising omissions from the awards. American Street<\/em>\u00a0by Ibi Zoboi was nowhere to be seen, to my chagrin, and I was sad not to see\u00a0 the excellent\u00a0Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine<\/em>\u00a0by Mark Twain, Phillip C. Stead, and Erin Stead recognized anywhere. I also love\u00a0Why Am I Me?<\/em> by Paige Britt, Selina Alko, and Sean Qualls, and had hoped it would land somewhere in the lists so that kids, parents, and teachers all over the country would discover it.
\nWere there books you were surprised to\u00a0see overlooked for the awards?
\nThere will be some\u00a0continued lively discussions, I suspect, about men and Caldecott medals. Back in 2010, I wrote a ShelfTalker post<\/a> breaking down some of the award\u00a0winners (Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz) by\u00a0gender. I will revisit that breakdown and bring it up to date. The Caldecott medals in particular seem to favor male artists, and this year, Caldecott Honor medalist Thi Bui\u00a0is the\u00a0sole woman in the mix. It’s not that the male winners of the awards year after year don’t deserve those awards; there is glorious art being made.\u00a0But the balance is so lopsided it begs the question: why do so few women win awards for their children’s book illustration? In the spirit of celebrating our best and brightest, here are a few female illustrators\u00a0I think are overdue for some Calde-love:\u00a0Barbara McClintock is on my list, as is Grace Lin. And how has Maira Kalman never\u00a0sported a Caldecott gold or silver on her dust jackets?
\nWhat female\u00a0illustrators would you like to see win the Caldecott?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s always a mix of joy and sorrow on Newbery\/Caldecott\/King\/Printz\/Sibert\/Geisel-and-more morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}