Chuck Close is so very honored to receive this award, and is so sorry he cannot be here. These masks were made from two of the hundreds of self-portraits he has created. We thought it was a fitting way to bring him into the room tonight. On behalf of Chuck Close and ourselves, we want to thank Roger Sutton, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Committee, and Simmons College.

Chuck Close is one of the most acclaimed visual artists in America. He lives and works in New York City. Chuck is known for his large-scale portraits of friends, fellow artists, and himself. He paints, draws, takes photographs, and makes prints, using every kind of media — oils, airbrush, paper pulp, pencil, and even his fingerprints. Although his style and process often change, his subject is always the face.

Chuck often says that art really saved his life. As a child he was severely learning disabled, had neuromuscular problems and could not play sports, and suffered from prosopagnosia, or “face blindness.” Growing up at a time when children with disabilities were seen as “dumb” and “lazy,” it was Chuck’s talent for drawing, along with the support he got from his parents and teachers, that saved him. Art was what he did to convince his teachers he was interested in school, and to feel good about himself. For the past twenty-four years he has been wheelchair-bound as the result of a spinal artery collapse that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He made a remarkable partial recovery that allows him to continue to paint using a harness to hold his brush. He credits the discipline and determination he learned as a child overcoming dyslexia with helping him get back to making art.

The genesis of this book was when I [Amanda] was hired to work with Chuck in 2007 by Prestel Publishing to oversee the quality control on a retrospective catalog, an adult book, called Work (2010). I had the real privilege of working with him over a period of time and I am proud to call him a friend. I asked him if there had been any children’s books about him and there had only been one, a wonderful book published by DK, now out of print. I asked him if he was interested in working with us on a children’s book and he said, “Sure.” So I called Joan and said, “Guess what!” and then we thought, “Great, but now what do we do?” Then the idea of the flipbook happened. Chuck has created so many head-on self-portraits from the same perspective, and we just played around with them until we came up with the idea. So then we had the middle of the book but we still didn’t know what the rest of the book would be.

We have a third partner named Ascha Drake who at the time was teaching at the Studio in a School in New York. It was Ascha’s idea to set up the interview between kids and Chuck, and she found the teacher and the class at PS 8 in Brooklyn. She provided the materials to teach the kids about Chuck. Then we had the interview and it was a wonderful, wonderful day. These twelve fifth graders arrived at the studio, full of beans, with their questions on index cards, and Chuck wheeled up to the door saying, “Come on in.” They sat on the floor and he asked them how old they were and then said, “Let me show you what I was doing at your age.” He had pulled out paintings that he made when he was twelve years old, so right off the bat he was saying, “See, we are all the same.” They started asking him questions, and at some point we suggested they stand to stretch their legs. They immediately surrounded Chuck in his wheelchair and followed him around, never leaving his side as he showed them his palette and his paintings. That day is what we tried to capture in the book. We took the questions and we took his answers and we put them together, so, yes, he is the author of this book. We are the people that tried to get it between the boards.

And then we thought, “Okay, who is going to publish this book?” and there was only one person and that was Howard Reeves at Abrams. Howard and I [Amanda] had developed a number of children’s books while I was at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Publications Department. He loved the book, as we had hoped he would.

This book was a true collaboration. Chuck brought his art, life experience, and voice, and we added our bookmaking and art education expertise to the mix. He graciously opened up his studio to the student interviewers and answered all their questions. He read and commented on the text and image layouts for the book that came out of that interview. He allowed us great latitude with his art, especially the center “flipbook,” which cuts his self-portraits in thirds so the reader can flip back and forth and compare many of his different processes. Many artists would have objected, but he improved on the idea, suggesting we include his black-and-white as well as color self-portraits. Working with Chuck was and is an extraordinary experience.

You go into a project like this hoping that the story you want to tell is a story people are interested to hear. We knew Chuck’s art and life were compelling and would be well received by those who know contemporary art, but we wanted to create a book engaging enough to attract those who don’t consider themselves artists, or think that “Art” resides only in museums. From the positive reviews, this wonderful award, and the responses from readers, we are optimistic about the book’s ability to reach a larger audience. That is a really good feeling.

Chuck is adamant about the importance of art education and the availability of art for children. Every time budgets are cut, it is art and music and theater that get axed. He would tell you that without art he wouldn’t have made it; that he was a very intelligent person who did not measure up in all of the conventional ways. He has made it a priority to advocate for art and art education, and we hope this book will continue that cause.

This speech was originally delivered on September 28, 2012, at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Ceremony at Simmons College.

The post Chuck Close: Face Book: 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award Acceptance Speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

With words like these, how could I have resisted falling under the spell of Lewis Michaux? I am thrilled that his story has been embraced by so many others. The man who said, “If you don’t know and you ain’t got no dough, then you can’t go and that’s for sho’!” would be strutting, proud. I certainly am.

I am honored to find my work in the company of the wonderful creators who have spoken here tonight. I want to thank the members of the Boston Globe–Horn Book committee — Thom Barthelmess, Lauren Adams, and Megan Lambert — for honoring Lewis’s story and helping bring him and his bookstore to readers, young and old. You are forever in my heart. I am grateful, also, to Roger Sutton and The Horn Book Magazine for championing children’s books and reading.

There is a large cast of people, some now passed on, who played parts, large and small, in this project. I owe much to family, longtime and newfound friends, librarians, fellow writers, editors, and those who gave their time and shared their knowledge of, and affection for, Lewis and his National Memorial African Bookstore. Thank you, Greg [Christie], for your inspired drawings. Above all, I thank God for enabling me to fulfill this dream and for sending me my husband, Drew, without whom this book would never have been completed.

I did not experience the kind of troubles my great-uncle Lewis had growing up, but, like Lewis, books were crucial in the making of me.

My love of reading began at bedtime — story time at my home. Our parents read to us every night, and kept on long after we could read on our own. They created a world in which books were valued. We saw them reading, and Dad often recited poetry from memory. They taught me to love words and respect their power.

Knowing what I know now, I have no doubt that my father’s love of literature, particularly poetry, was influenced by Lewis. My mother, too, who worked in the bookstore before marrying my dad, must certainly have caught the fever. I might be standing here today because of Lewis’s influence.

Lewis once said, “Where did I get that literary idea? I could have been an iceman.” If he had been an iceman, I wouldn’t be speaking to you about him now. And I have to wonder, would I have become a writer? I may owe more to him than I know.

I never really knew my great-uncle. My father’s side of the family lived in New York. In the summer, my parents and my brothers and sisters and I would pile into our Chevy station wagon and drive from Pittsburgh to Westchester County for a weeklong visit. We spent most of our time at my paternal grandparents’ home in Port Chester or playing in the sand at Rye Beach. I may have been at the store more than I remember, but I have only one fairly clear memory.

The bookstore was narrow and crowded with books and pamphlets and customers, and I remember the portraits of famous black people lining the walls, looking down on me. Uncle Lewis gave me two books — The Masquerade, An Historical Novel by Oscar Micheaux, and a copy of the King James Bible. I was fourteen. The experience must have meant something to me because these books remain in my collection.

Fast forward to the late 1980s, to the University of Pittsburgh School of Library and Information Science.

“Micheaux? Are you related to that Harlem bookseller?”

Time and again I was asked this by other students and professors. Apparently, big things had occurred at the National Memorial African Bookstore. I wanted to find out what these people knew about my family that I didn’t, and so began my research.

I was simply compiling family history. A book was not in my plans. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the notion of a biography became real. By then, I had learned enough about Lewis to realize the bookstore was only his culmination, that the real story lay in his inspiring journey.

It started as straight biography and evolved into something my husband labeled “documentary fiction.”

I lived with this project for fifteen years, putting it on the back burner when I had to. I am a full-time youth services librarian and was writing other books along the way, so I couldn’t actively work on it every day, but the story was always hovering, enticing me back into Lewis’s world, challenging me to finish.

Creating voices for the individuals in No Crystal Stair was some of the most enjoyable composing I’ve ever done. The process allowed me to explore character in a deeper, more intimate way.

I was finding great pleasure in the writing of it but one day asked myself — what is this exactly? Teen biography? No, I had already crossed the line into invention, and invention spells fiction. But was it teen fiction? By page 14, Lewis is an adult. Where was the teenage protagonist? Even if I found an editor who liked it, could it pass muster in an acquisitions meeting? What publisher would buy this book?

I realized it didn’t matter. I needed to continue the project for my family. There was much support coming from that direction — including from Lewis himself. His spirit was there — prodding. He wanted his story told, and I knew in my soul that someone, the Lord or Lewis himself, had chosen me to do it. So I forged ahead and finally reached the end of the first draft in the new format.

In the last chapter, the final voice was Lewis Junior’s. To write his chapters I replayed an interview I had taped with him years earlier. As I listened, it occurred to me there was another story here — a picture book from this child’s point of view. Lewis Jr. had told some wonderful tales about the people he’d met in the store, and about his relationship with his father. A picture book might be more marketable. Perhaps this was the way to introduce Lewis Sr. to young people of today.

So I returned the larger project to the back burner, put my efforts into writing a picture book, and eventually sent it to my amazing agents, Tracey and Josh Adams. Tracey sent it on to my extraordinary editor Andrew Karre at Lerner. It struck a chord. Tracey told me that Andrew said, “I’d love to see a teen biography about this guy.” “Well,” I said, “I have something. It’s not nearly finished and it’s not really a biography any more. But I’m happy to let Andrew read it.” The rest is history.

In 2011, I had lunch with Andrew at ALA in New Orleans and expressed my thanks for the company’s courage in taking on a book that may be destined for the remainder bin. He said, “Vaun, we’re Carolrhoda LAB. It’s what we do — experiment.”

Thank you, Andrew, Adam Lerner, and everyone at Carolrhoda, for your commitment to “boundary-pushing fiction for teens and their sympathizers.” Thank you for your belief in this book. And thank you, Megan, Lauren, and Thom, for validating that belief.

Sometimes you have to do an awful lot of writing to figure out exactly what it is you have to say, to find the story you want to tell and the path that works best for the telling. The late Professor William E. Coles Jr. called this kind of prewriting “throat-clearing.” I owe much to Bill Coles, with whom I had the privilege to teach in the University of Pittsburgh writing program. He brought me to tears numerous times, and I probably learned more about writing from him than from any single individual. I like the term throat-clearing. It’s precise, clarifying.

Sometimes my throat-clearing takes place on the inside, before pen is ever put to paper. More often, I think I have an idea for a story and, with great enthusiasm, set to writing it, only to find, after multiple revisions, that my original thought was not the story at all but only the idea that led to the real story.

It’s like finding your way through a maze. You wish you could have simplified the task by taking the direct route, which you can clearly see now that you are out but, deep inside, you know if you had taken the direct route, you wouldn’t have come out the same…not really.

No Crystal Stair may have taken fifteen years, but it needed those years. I needed those years to become a better writer. I made exciting discoveries along the way which led me in unexpected and rewarding directions, directions I wouldn’t have taken if I’d found my way out of the maze sooner.

Lewis somehow figured out that reading was a good thing for him and it would be a good thing for other striving African Americans. He believed that who we become depends a great deal on our desire to be educated, our efforts to know our history and ourselves, to discover how we might contribute.

Pastor Charles Becknell, who frequented the bookstore, told me, “Alex Haley said that when an older person dies, it’s like a library being burned to the ground…Lewis Michaux took his knowledge with him. But it wasn’t a complete destruction. He transferred some of it to people who came into his bookstore. He left tentacles that reached a lot of people like me. So his spirit is still here. That didn’t go away with him. It’s what we all need to do, leave something that spreads to other people.”

In his final days, Uncle Lewis said to my brother: “You’re building upon a strong family, a strong history that will be lost unless somebody picks it up. There has to be somebody who’s part of it in spirit to keep climbing, to make it a reality.”

I hope, through No Crystal Stair, I’m doing my part.

This speech was originally delivered on September 28, 2012, at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Ceremony at Simmons College. Click here for illustrator R. Gregory Christie’s acceptance speech for No Crystal Stair.

The post No Crystal Stair: Author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s 2012 BGHB Fiction Award Speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’d like to take the opportunity to tell Vaunda Micheaux Nelson about my deep respect for her talent. The images for No Crystal Stair were a direct result of her storytelling, and those scratchy blotted ink lines simply flowed due to her superb documentary novel’s narration.

Vaunda really expanded my mind with Lewis’s story and the possibility to achieve greater heights in life no matter what the circumstances. The novel is inspirational to me, and Lewis is such a fascinating character. The story of this Harlem bookseller is a story I’d like many people to know, and I trust that the book will live on for generations to come.

I often tell people that when it comes to my choices in projects, I do the books that I wish that I had had when I was a child. Books like No Crystal Stair are among a long line of children’s books that speak of American history, the good and bad of it. It’s a story about a pretty eccentric straight shooter who comes across so charming to me that he inspires me to take a chance and to feel proud about my culture, ethnicity, and history. But beyond my own feelings, I want people, especially children of color, to feel a confidence in their own skin, hair, features, ancestors, and culture.

It’s my feeling that a man like Lewis, who seemed to be a strong proponent of gaining knowledge and finding a love for all things “black,” would be happy with this homage. Throughout the story you get a feeling that he was highly intelligent, a product of his environment and a person that took whatever was available to him and made it his own. I felt truly inspired by the man’s story, and I love that the book touches on so many historical figures who knew the value of that store and what Lewis was building.

But once again it’s a history that seems lost in our modern times; most of the young people who I spoke to about this project didn’t know about Lewis and found his personality and biography interesting. It is my hope that this book will be a part of many others that will help to build a counterbalance to our schools’ history curriculums. We are in the American melting pot, and our mesh of culture should incorporate a mesh of stories. With such a diversity of ethnic groups in our 3.79 million square miles, we should have heroes of many color shades. The history of the Native American names of our states and towns shouldn’t have died with the people they were named after. Inventions and discoveries from people of color should also stay in all of our minds as strongly as we know the names of the founding fathers.

I feel that books such as No Crystal Stair help to create another viewpoint for our history lessons, and awards such as the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards help to keep these books alive.

I’d like to thank the committee and Roger Sutton for this designation; it’s a true honor and I know it couldn’t have been an easy decision to make. I am ecstatic to be in such great company of award winners whose work I’ve known and admired for quite a while. It’s never easy for a painter to go from the solitude of his studio on to a stage full of focused eyes and attentive ears, but when all has been said and seeps into a distant memory, it feels amazing to be honored along with some amazing talent.

I also send my highest respect and gratitude to Lerner Publishing for giving me the opportunity to work on this project. Thank you to Harry and Adam Lerner for their support with all my projects with the company. A huge thanks to Andrew Karre for his editing and vision to pull things together from sketches and a manuscript to the book we see today. Also immense thanks to Danielle Carnito. One never knows what a graphic designer will do to a series of paintings and words, but Danielle hit it out of the park. Thank you to Simmons College and to the Horn Book for hosting this event, and thank you to everyone hearing these words, and let’s keep reading and protect our libraries.

This speech was originally delivered on September 28, 2012, at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Ceremony at Simmons College. Click here for author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s acceptance speech for No Crystal Stair.

The post No Crystal Stair: Illustrator R. Gregory Christie’s 2012 BGHB Fiction Award Speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

And now, since we know each other pretty well, I want to tell you about a date I went on. It was a first date, and we were at my house, and the conversation was lagging, so I said she should look at my friend Jon’s website. (Now you see what we picture book authors are reduced to: “Come back to my place so I can show you Jon Klassen’s etchings.”) Anyway, as I was clicking through images, I saw a piece I hadn’t noticed before. A girl and her dog were walking through the snow wearing identical sweaters. I loved it, and right there I started telling my date the first bits of the story that would become Extra Yarn: a girl in a small town finds a box of colorful yarn. She takes it home and knits a sweater for herself, and when she finds she has some extra yarn, she knits a sweater for her dog. She still has extra yarn and so she knits sweaters for people, and animals, and mailboxes, and houses, and —

Here my date interrupted to finish the story and said, “And she covers the whole earth in yarn, and then everyone is wearing the same sweater, and then there’s peace.”

That was our last date.

I’ve read books like that before. I hate books like that. Her story line was not just uninteresting to me: it was fundamentally dishonest. There was no surprise, or mystery, or failure, or darkness, or strangeness, or any of the complexity that makes stories and life rich. Her story was all loveliness, but it wasn’t even convincingly lovely. Too often we tell kids pleasant stories devoid of truth, and stories without truth are not good stories. Our audience deserves more from us.

I started telling stories to kids when I was in college and worked at a summer camp for four- to six-year-olds. It was a sports summer camp, and I was in charge of the four-year-olds, and four-year-olds can’t really play sports, which is good, because neither can I. I would actually learn things at this camp. I would come home and say, “Did you know that when you sprint you’re supposed to run on the balls of your feet?” and my best friend would say, “Everybody knows that, Mac, and that’s why you run funny.” That part of camp was very painful.

But the good part came when my campers would get a soccer ball and aimlessly dribble through some cones before getting tired and heading for the shade, where I was already sitting. And I would tell them stories. I started out with autobiographical serials that would begin on Monday and continue through Friday. The stories always opened the same way: Last Friday night I got home, and I was very tired and looking forward to relaxing when the phone rang. It was the Queen of England, and she asked me for a favor. I had to go on a mission for her.

Soon something strange started happening. I realized that the kids believed me. Campers I’d never met before would come up to me and say, “Aren’t you the guy who spies for the Queen of England?” — which is a question I’d been waiting my whole life to be asked. (In my dreams the person asking was a svelte Russian woman, but I had to take what I could get.) But I began to realize that in a very particular way, my stories were real for these kids.

There was one little girl, Riley, whom I’ll never forget. She would get cantaloupe in her lunch every day, and she hated melon, so she would just throw the fruit away in the ivy. She was eating just the junk in her lunch, and, as a camp counselor, I felt like it was my responsibility to step in. I said, “Riley, you can’t just throw your cantaloupe in the bushes. If you do that, the place is going to be overrun with melons—we’ll have a real melon problem. So eat it.” Really, it was not a very good nutrition intervention at all, but that’s what I told her. She didn’t listen. So, on the last day of camp, I went to the grocery store, and I bought the biggest cantaloupe they had, and that morning I hid the melon in the ivy.

At lunchtime I said, “Riley, I think you should look in the bushes and see what you’ve done.” And Riley went trudging into the ivy and poked around for a little while, and then her face lit up, and she reached down and pulled up a cantaloupe the size of her head. All the campers ran over to see the melon. They crowded around her and were universally wowed. (Except for one kid; he asked, “Why is there a sticker on it?”)

I said, “See, that’s why I tell you to make sure you throw away your fruit stickers in the trashcans. When you just toss them in the ivy, they ruin nature.” Everybody seemed very satisfied with that answer.

And for the rest of the day, Riley, who was tiny, walked from activity to activity cradling this giant melon in her arms, so proud that she’d grown it herself.

I think about Riley a lot, still, because a little girl hauling around a cantaloupe is, to me, an image of the ideal reader. Children can comfortably exist in the overlap between fantasy and reality — Riley knew she didn’t grow a melon, but she also knew that she really did. Kids can make believe — truly make themselves believe; suss out the rules that govern a fantasy and fully experience it, intellectually and emotionally. This is what all fiction asks readers to do, become invested in made-up worlds, and kids are better at it than adults. They’re great fiction readers. So we who write for them need to create great fictions.

The picture book is uniquely positioned as a storytelling medium. The great divide in fiction is between the commercial and the literary. Commercial fiction first must entertain, while literature should provide some insight about what it means to live. That distinction is usually rigorously policed by writers and critics and readers and marketing departments.

But in picture books, that border is more porous. It’s a popular art. A picture book must be entertaining, but it is also expected to convey some truth. Books that try too hard to please can end up pandering. Books that strain for meaning can end up moralizing. The best picture books, though, meet this dual obligation. We get to write literary fiction that lots of people actually buy. (What a world!)

Some of the most challenging, most exciting, and most interesting picture books that have ever been written are also the most widely read. Sendak, Silverstein, Brown, and Hurd: some of our boldest pioneers are still our bestsellers. The tradition of the picture book is a tradition of experimentation.

There used to be a strong conviction that one way to make people want to read a picture book was to make it unlike anything else. Today it often feels the prevailing wisdom dictates that the best way to make people want to read a picture book is to make it a whole lot like another book that has sold well. The same plots get trotted out. Great ideas are given buzzcuts and lined up on the bookshelf.

I’m not a deluded nostalgist: I know that there have always been bland picture books. There have always been bland people, and bland children — I know a couple. But it’s the bold books—the experiments—that drive our form. And when too many books on the shelf start to look the same, it creates the illusion that the picture book has nothing to say, that our art is hidebound, vapid, foundering. It is not.

I’m bullish about the future of the picture book. I love good picture books with strange stories, shaggy stories, books full of mysteries and surprises. These books are still being written. But they need to be read, and loved, and faced out on a bookshelf so you can see their beautiful covers.

And so I’m particularly honored that our book has received this award, which, as Roger Sutton says, often recognizes “unusual” books. Thank God for unusual books!

There are no formulas, there are no dogmas. There are no rules except for this: Try to write books that are honest and good. I am trying, and I will keep trying. Thank you.

This speech was originally delivered on September 28, 2012, at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Ceremony at Simmons College. Click here for illustrator Jon Klassen’s acceptance speech for Extra Yarn.

The post Extra Yarn: Author Mac Barnett’s 2012 BGHB Picture Book Award Speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’d like to start by thanking the judges for picking us out of all the great books they had to choose from this year, and for including us on a list with the other authors and illustrators here — we are in very flattering company.

I’d also like to thank our publisher Balzer + Bray at HarperCollins, and our agent, Sir Steven Malk, who is no small part of why this book got put together. And I’d like to thank Mac [Barnett] for writing this book for me to illustrate. I’m not sure you can pay an illustrator a higher compliment than writing a book with that person in mind, and it’s a truly lucky thing to get one from an author who understands how to give the illustrator a lot of favors and make him look good.

Before I was lucky enough to get into doing picture books full time, I worked in animation studios, which is another lucky job to have. My job there mostly was to help design sets and props that they would build in 3-D for the movie. One time we were having a meeting to go over ideas for a set we had to do of an old dusty bar, and we were talking about other old dusty bars we’d seen that we could reference.

One of the guys said, “You know which movie had a great old bar kind of like the one we want? There Will Be Blood. There’s a scene where he brings his brother to a brothel and it’s this big, dingy place made of gray old wood and it’s dimly lit and not too ornate” And we all are nodding, going, “Yeah, that WAS a great bar — old mason jars and no rugs on the floors or anything, just like what we’re going for.”

So we all agree this warrants a screening of that part of the film, and we meet up later and put it in the DVD player, notepads on our laps and everything, and we get to the scene, and it’s one shot. It’s a close-up of the main character leaning against a barely visible wall, the sounds of a bar and glasses and crass laughing in the background, and it lasts for about twenty seconds, and it’s done. That’s the whole bar scene.

We couldn’t believe it. Collectively, we had built in our minds a five-minute-long scene and an entire bar set around twenty seconds of close-up footage. I bet if we had been asked to draw the bar we had in our heads before we re-watched the movie and saw that there was actually no bar, we would’ve come up with almost the same place.

Later that same year, I got offered my very first picture book illustration job. I was excited, and decided to go look at all the books that I liked best growing up, not to research or anything necessarily, but just to sort of celebrate that I was going to get to do one. All of them gave me the exact same feeling we’d had with the bar scene. It’s not that they weren’t as good as I’d remembered, but it’s that they were so much simpler in almost every way. I’d built huge night landscapes around P. D. Eastman’s Sam and the Firefly that were actually just very vague patches of pencil shading over one color (dark teal), and I’d built entire forests around Frog and Toad’s houses when the illustrations are actually small vignettes in which you rarely even see the whole shape of a plant from bottom to top.

In the stories we seem to remember most, we’re given a certain set of ingredients to start us off, and then we’re let loose to build on them and let them affect us and use what we know and what we’ve felt, and we tie the whole experience together into one thing, without a separation between what the story gave us and what we ourselves brought to it.

Where this gets the most interesting is when the things being suggested aren’t landscapes or dusty bar sets but emotional experiences. I’m not sure Extra Yarn has a point, but if it does, I think it can be found on two isolated pages near the middle of the book.

Annabelle has been knitting sweaters for everybody indiscriminately, and the book is showing everybody wearing them and feeling generally pretty good about it.

Then it shows a man named Mr. Crabtree, who apparently lives outside and wears nothing but shorts and stands around in the snow. He refuses a sweater, not angrily, but calmly, on some principle he’s built for himself that isn’t explained.

The second page shows him wearing a hat that Annabelle made him instead, to coincide with his wishes. It’s the only close-up on anybody we have in the book, and Mr. Crabtree is smiling a small smile wearing his new hat. Nothing is said in the text about his emotional state, and I can’t explain exactly why this spread is the most important one, but I know I was more nervous drawing his smile than any other part of the book, which usually means you’re onto something good.

Picture books are so good at this kind of thing because the story itself happens between the two elements that make it up. It is, by its nature, a suggestive medium. Neither the author nor the illustrator is ever actually working on exactly what is going to be taken away by the reader. The negative space between them, the shape of that, is the story, and it exists only when it’s being put together by the reader as they go through it. This idea that readers put these things together themselves seems like a bit of a lonely one.

The less explicit a story is, the more it counts on us to bring our unique experiences to it in order to fill it in. This seems to mean that everybody’s impression of a story must be different, and nobody’s really seeing the same thing. But I keep running into examples where it’s much less lonely than that. That the bars we thought we saw in the movie but were never shown are actually a lot alike, and the way we all think Mr. Crabtree might feel is actually pretty universal.

When I finished the roughs for Extra Yarn, I e-mailed them to my parents to show them how things were going, and my mom wrote back and told me she loved them and that they brought back memories of books she’d read us when we were little, and also told me that I am a good boy, and also how is the cat. Ordinarily the part about them reminding her about books we used to read would be a pretty standard comment, but I called her and we talked for a long time about which books she meant.

I told her that when I read Mac’s text for the book, it reminded me a lot of this memory I’d had of a disparate bunch of books she would read to us. They had a few things in common — a couple of them were about kings and castles and riddles and children, but they were by different authors, and different illustrators, and the only thing holding them together was the fact that we’d read them together around the same time. But the memory they made together, that I thought I’d made alone, was something my mom had seen, too. Not only that, but she recognized it in the roughs of this new book. It was like she was describing to me a dream I thought I’d had by myself, but it turned out she’d had it, too.

This medium works best when it’s most suggestive, when it gives us the freedom to walk around and fill in these things on our own. But what’s amazing about this is, given all that freedom to be on our own and make these stories personal to us alone, we end up meeting each other anyway. We can’t help it, and there’s something hugely hopeful about that.

Getting a chance to work on these things that people use to meet, in places like the ones my mom and I used to meet, is a massive privilege, and to be recognized for it by people who value that is a huge, huge honor. Thank you very, very much.

This speech was originally delivered on September 28, 2012, at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards Ceremony at Simmons College. Click here for author Mac Barnett’s acceptance speech for Extra Yarn.

The post Extra Yarn: Illustrator Jon Klassen’s 2012 BGHB Picture Book Award Speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

Cathryn Mercier and Roger Sutton open the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony (7:01):

Julie Fogliano and Erin E. Stead accept the 2012 BGHB PB Honor Book award (7:07):

Judge Megan Lambert accepts the BGHB PB Honor Award for And the Soldiers Sang (4:36):

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen accept the 2012 BGHB Picture Book award for Extra Yarn (21:38):

Publisher Betsy Groban accepts the 2012 BGHB NF Honor Award for Georgia in Hawaii (5:59):

Caitlin O’Connell and Donna M. Jackson accept the 2012 BGHB NF Honor Book Award (14:01):

Joan Sommers and Amanda Freymann accept the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book NF Award (14:02):

Mal Peet accepts the 2012 BGHB Fiction Honor Book Award for Life: An Exploded Diagram (7:00):

Elizabeth Wein accepts the 2012 BGHB Fiction Honor Book Award for Code Name Verity (5:23):

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and R. Gregory Christie accept the 2012 BGHB Fiction award (19:12):

Horn Book editor in chief Roger Sutton’s closing remarks  (1:48):

The post Video from BGHB Awards — September 28, 2012 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners and honor books. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Roger Sutton, Viki Ash, Thom Barthelmess, Lauren Adams. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Cathie Mercier's opening remarks. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Roger Sutton's opening remarks. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Caitlin O’Connell. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Elizabeth Wein. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

R. Gregory Christie. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Megan Lambert, Thom Barthelmess, Lauren Adams. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Julie Fogliano. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Roger Sutton. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Joan Sommers and Amanda Freymann. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Andrew Karre, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, Deborah Taylor, R. Gregory Christie. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Roger Sutton, Jon Klassen, Mac Barnett. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Illustration by Erin E. Stead. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Illustration by Erin E. Stead. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Elizabeth Wein, Mal Peet, Martha V. Parravano. Photo: Shara Hardeson.

Photos from the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards and The Horn Book at Simmons: Look Out! Also check out video from the event, our Twitter timelines for BGHB and HBAS, press release for the books, and the HBAS program.

The post Photos from the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards and HBAS appeared first on The Horn Book.

More on the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards and the following day’s Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium: “Look Out!” is coming soon! Follow us on Twitter for updates on all things Horn Book.

Cathryn Mercier and Roger Sutton open the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony (7:01):

Julie Fogliano and Erin E. Stead accept the 2012 BGHB PB Honor Book award (7:07):

Judge Megan Lambert accepts the BGHB PB Honor Award for And the Soldiers Sang (4:36):

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen accept the 2012 BGHB Picture Book award for Extra Yarn (21:38):

The post Picture Book Award video from BGHB Awards — September 28, 2012 appeared first on The Horn Book.

L-R: editor Andrew Karre, author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, moderator/librarian Deborah Taylor, and illustrator R. Gregory Christie during their panel on No Crystal Stair Saturday afternoon. Photo: Shara Hardeson

On Saturday, September 29, we held our third annual Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium with the theme “Look Out!”.  Miss the fun? We’ve compiled a timeline of the day’s highlights based on tweets by our staff, visitors from our sister publication School Library Journal, and other attendees. See Friday’s ceremony timeline here.

9:13am: Good morning! We’re ready for a full day of great books at the Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium!

9:20am: Coffee, cider donuts (yum), and Horn Book editor in chief Roger Sutton’s opening remarks—off to a good start!

9:25am: Roger Sutton: “What strikes me most about the books honored last night and today is that they “look out,” emphasis on the 2nd word”

9:31am: BGHB chair Thom Barthelmess on nonfiction winners: committee looked for books that “inform and delight in equal measure”

@sljournal, 9:31am: “Look Out” the theme of today’s Horn Book colloquium at Simmons College

@1stSentenceTest, 9:37am: “Everyone needs a chance to feel special” Chuck Close on his parents, who thought he was “the greatest thing since sliced bread”

9:38am: BGHB Nonfiction Award winner Chuck Close (in video from his studio): “Art saved my life”

@1stSentenceTest, 9:47am: “Chuck often says ‘if I didn’t go to Yale I would’ve gone to jail’” Amanda Freymann on the artist

@1stSentenceTest, 9:49am: “He often watched soap operas while he was (painting)” Joan Summers on Chuck Close

9:57am: Chuck Close: “Ease is the enemy of the artist”

10:14am: Chuck Close on why he paints faces: “The face is a roadmap of a life”

@1stSentenceTest, 10:22am: “His life is a testament to the importance of art education” Joan Sommers on Chuck Close

10:29am: Amanda Freymann on Chuck Close: “There is not a medium this guy hasn’t experimented with”

10:51am: BGHB judge Lauren Adams introducing fiction panel: “We all felt both lucky and challenged to have such great books to choose from”

10:59am: Video giving us a glimpse into Lewis Michaux’s bookstore in Harlem begins the panel on BGHB Fiction winner No Crystal Stair and African American literature

@1stSentenceTest, 11:04am: “They call me the professor and I say ‘you’re right. I professed to do something and I did it.’”—Lewis Michaux

11:03am: No Crystal Stair author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson (Lewis Michaux’s great-niece): “Education and knowledge, reading, can be a powerful and life-changing, life-saving thing”

11:13am: Moderator and librarian Deborah Taylor: “How do you keep the format from overwhelming the story?” Editor Andrew Karre: “It’s like building an airplane in flight”

11:28am: Illustrator R. Gregory Christie: “We all need to come together and learn each other’s history”

@sljournal, 11:22am: Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards/Colloquium honors V. Micheaux Nelson’s “No Crystal Stair” on her great-uncle, Harlem bookseller Lewis Michaux.

@sljournal, 11:24am: Deborah Taylor: “Anyone interested in the long arc of lives should be interested in No Crystal Stair”

@sljournal, 11:28am: Bookseller “Lewis Michaux was saved by books and went on to save others with them.”

11:37am: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson on her term “documentary novel”: “When a writer begins to invent, you need to own up to that & call it fiction”

@LernerBooks, 11:44am: NO CRYSTAL STAIR’s Vaunda Nelson & R. Gregory Christie celebrate @ #HBAS12 & work on new project yfrog.com/hwy2obcj

@andrewkarre, 12:06pm: Vaunda and Greg signing after our panel @HornBook pic.twitter.com/PuEpQc3z

12:36pm: Time for breakout sessions on “looking out” from different perspectives: creators, academics, librarians, teachers, editors/publishers

@andrewkarre, 12:41pm: Liz Bicknell @HornBook: “Editing is a form of sanctioned gambling.” Truth.

@sljournal, 1:08pm: Horn Book honors Caitlin O’Connell and Donna M. Jackson’s The Elephant Scientist: “Science writing…starts with story.”

@sljournal, 1:34pm:  Caitlin O’Connell and Donna M. Jackson’s The Elephant Scientist coming as an enhanced ebook in Nov. Cool.

1:49pm: BGHB judge Megan Lambert introducing picture book panel: “I’m always on the lookout for kids’ reactions to picture books”

@sljevent, 1:54pm: Look out! Here come the picture books! #BGHB honor book And Then It’s Spring and winner Extra Yarn up now at #BGHB ow.ly/i/YICS

2:01pm: Author Mac Barnett was inspired by a single image on illustrator Jon Klassen’s website and wrote Extra Yarn “in the world of Jon’s art”

2:15pm: Jon Klassen on whether bear & rabbit of I Want My Hat Back are in Extra Yarn: “truth is I just don’t draw too many different-looking animals”

@sljevent, 2:17pm: Klassen says similarities between bear and rabbit in Extra Yarn & I Want My Hat Back weren’t intended, there’s no rabbit resurrection

2:26pm: Author Julie Fogliano says she didn’t set out to write a picture book with And Then It’s Spring but was “writing just to write”

2:34pm: Illustrator Erin Stead specifically paced Julie’s text, added characters to “make you stay there” and linger over her words

@sljevent, 2:37pm: “I wanted to keep the reader slowly walking through this book…but I didn’t want them to leave…” Erin Stead

2:37pm: Fascinating to see Jon Klassen’s rough drawings for Extra Yarn & block print blocks Erin Stead used in And Then It’s Spring

2:44pm: Author Philip Stead saw Erin’s illustration of bears waking in And Then It’s Spring, ran upstairs, & wrote Bear Has a Story to Tell

2:47pm: Mac Barnett says he’s “very conscious that the story’s not finished” when he’s done writing; the narrative continues with illustrations

2:56pm: Roger Sutton: “what I love about both [Extra Yarn & And Then It's Spring] is how much space they have. Thanks for giving us room to breathe”

2:59pm: Mac Barnett on yarn-bombing: “I was not at all familiar w/ the practice when I wrote [Extra Yarn]…I definitely am not cool enough”

3:21pm: This BGHB crossword puzzle by Tim Wynne-Jones is hard!

3:23pm: Horn Book executive editor Martha Parravano moderating discussion between fiction honorees Elizabeth Wein and Mal Peet on War Stories

3:28pm: Mal Peet on inspiration for Life: An Exploded Diagram: “…and in my cheerful way, I was thinking about nuclear missiles…”

@1stSentenceTest, 3:31pm: “I start with a small riff and improvise madly around it” Mal Peet on composing a story

3:36pm: Elizabeth Wein: “Writing [Code Name Verity] was absolutely liberating”; it was fun to “play around with form”

3:40pm: Mal Peet: “When you get to my age, the difference between autobiographical novel and historical fiction gets kind of blurred”

@1stSentenceTest, 3:42pm: “When I went to university I was in a hurry to lose two things: my virginity and my accent.” Mal Peet on being from Norfolk

3:45pm: Code Name Verity‘s main characters “Verity” and Maddie were originally a single character who was both a spy and a pilot

3:50pm: Fun fact: Elizabeth Wein has her pilot’s license!

4:05pm: Panel on the Picture Book Proclamation with signatories Jon Klassen, Mac Barnett, Erin Stead, & Philip Stead

4:09pm: Erin Stead: “The first time I ever heard from Mac, he asked me for money. For the ad.”

@sljevent, 4:12pm: The picture book is not dead proclaim Mac Barnett, Jon Klassen, and Erin & Philip Stead.

4:21pm: Erin Stead: “You’re looking at 4 people who every day are trying to make a good book, and that is hard to do! [The picture book] is not over yet”

4:24pm: Mac Barnett: “We could enter a golden age of picture books at any time. But you never know when you’re in it”

4:31pm: Do libraries and librarians need a Proclamation?

4:36pm: Mac Barnett: “there are so many frontiers in this form”; Jon Klassen: “there’s no other form where you can take so many risks”

4:40pm: Closing remarks by Cathie Mercier: “imaginative power of books is limited if we don’t also talk and write about them”

4:44pm: Cathie Mercier: “In ‘looking out’ for children’s literature we must also look in, to examine our own assumptions”

4:53pm: Thanks for celebrating with us! Next year’s awards & colloquium are in the works for 1st weekend in Oct.—mark your calendars!

@Dina_at_Disney, 5:13pm: With @ABBalzer in the Amtrak quiet car…we’ve only been shushed once so far, but I have a feeling there will be more.

@ThatEliseHoward, 5:24pm: @Dina_at_Disney @ABBalzer Ha! Same thing happened to Anne Schwartz and me on the way to @HornBook Awards a few years ago. Rowdy publishers.

@ABBalzer, 5:53pm: @ThatEliseHoward @Dina_at_Disney @HornBook And now the drinks have started too! It’s going to be trouble.

10:57am Sunday: Elizabeth Wein flies home from Boston—but is she flying in the plane or flying it herself? We like to think the latter!

More on the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards and the following day’s Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium: “Look Out!” is coming soon! Follow us on Twitter for updates on all things Horn Book.

The post 2012 Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium timeline appeared first on The Horn Book.

Editor in chief Roger Sutton opening the ceremony, with judges Megan Lambert, Thom Barthelmess, and Lauren Adams looking on. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

We just can’t get enough of our Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winners! After spending two great days with them at the ceremony on Friday night and the colloquium on Saturday, we’re back at the office sorting through the weekend’s tweets, speeches, and (300-plus!) photos.

We’ve compiled a timeline of Friday night’s highlights; Saturday’s are coming soon. Photographs and video are on the way as well.

The post BGHB recap appeared first on The Horn Book.