A.

B.

C.

What about this father-son pair?

D.

E.

This post is part of our “Guess who”? author and illustrator photo series. Click on the tag Guess who? to see all entries!

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I am so pleased that he will be keynoting our conference, Fostering Lifelong Learners: Prescribing Books for Early Childhood Education, to be held on April 25th at the Cambridge Public Library (free! Sign up!). The Horn Book is co-sponsoring this conference with CPL and with Reach Out and Read, of which Dr. Needlman is a co-founder and a member of its board of directors. Here I give him the five-question treatment.

1. You are one of the founders of Reach Out and Read. What led you to think that such a program was needed?

It was a combination of several things: being the son of a nursery-school teacher; living up the hill from a bookstore, where I found a copy of Jim Trelease’s Read Aloud Handbook; training in an interdisciplinary child development unit where we had doctors and educators working closely together; being trained to think about children and families holistically; and having a young daughter at home, reading to her every night.  It was exciting to realize that emergent literacy was a field that was not spoken of at all in the pediatric literature. Imagine that! A whole area of crucial child development which doctors seemed utterly unaware of. It was an opportunity that could not be passed up.

2. What did being a parent teach you about being a doctor?

Pretty much everything. The key to effective pediatric practice is empathy– being able to connect to the powerful feelings of love, hope, and fear which all of us parents share. Some gifted doctors can make this connection without being parents themselves, but for me it was the process of falling in love with my own child, and living in constant fear for her, that allowed me, as a young person, to make common cause with the parents in my care. I think these same forces keep me going today.

3. Your mother taught at the University of Chicago Lab School, which is justly proud of its storytelling and read-aloud traditions. What stories did she read or tell to you?

I don’t really remember stories she read to me. I do remember (or think I remember) listening to Tall Fireman Paul, while lying on the couch in the house where I grew up. And I remember many, many conversations about things that went on in my mom’s preschool classrooms– stories about the children and their learning, about things in the world and about their own feelings and ideas. My mother was, by every measure, an extraordinary teacher, and still is, in her 80′s.

4. What advice can you give to the parent who is shy about reading aloud?

I’m not sure what “shy” means in this context. Some parents hesitate to read aloud in front of other adults (that is, in front of me, in the clinic). They’re a bit shy about making goofy animal noises or really letting loose and enjoying the book.  But I think you might mean, instead of shy, unsure of themselves, doubting their ability to “do it right.” In these cases, advice may be useful, but I find direct hands-on demonstration and feedback to be more useful. If a mother can see how I do it (no magic, just having fun and trying to engage the child in a playful exchange), then she can often do it herself with me watching, and then I can point out the things that she and her child are doing that are just right , just what “reading” should be. I think this sort of hands-on in-the-moment teaching is something special that we as doctors have to offer.

5. What children’s book do you hope shows up at every baby shower?

I’m a fan of Pat The Bunny, because it appeals to multiple senses and invites a baby’s active exploration; I’m only sorry that it’s so narrow in its ethnic and cultural identification. For little babies, of course, it’s mainly the sound of the parent’s voice that is so attractive. So, any book that an adult might want to read would work fine.  Some parents I know read their latest romance potboiler, some read their chemistry textbooks, both fine choices. The classics, of course, need to be part of every childhood: Goodnight Moon, The Snowy Day, Where the Wild Things Are, of course, but also Stone Soup, Millions of Cats, Blueberries for Sal, and so many more. My own favorite was Time Of Wonder by Robert McCloskey. It lived on a high shelf, and my daughter knew it was special; we’d take it down and read it together when we felt in the mood.

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2013, for a big day focused on the littlest people.

The post Five Questions for Dr. Robert Needlman of Reach Out and Read appeared first on The Horn Book.

Friends Gerald McDermott and Doug Cushman. Photo credit: Angela Schellenberg

During one of the last times Gerald was here in Paris, we went off hunting for an oyster restaurant. We finally found one in the Quartier Montorgueil on Rue des Petits Carreaux. The owner shipped oysters from his own farm on the Brittany coast so they were guaranteed to be fresh. We ordered a plate of thirty-six and a bottle of Muscadet and savored each sweet shelled beauty. After staring at the empty platter for a few minutes we looked at each other and ordered another twenty-four. Coffee was taken and I asked for the check. I handed the owner the money and told him to keep the rest as a pourboire (a tip, but literally, “for a drink”). The owner brought over a bottle of Armagnac and poured us both — and himself — a drink. In our bumbling French Gerald and I learned about our host’s oyster beds and hometown. We stumbled out of the restaurant and into the Metro station, said our good-byes, and promised that we’d return soon for another grand plat des huitres.

Sadly, the restaurant has gone forever.

Sadly, so has Gerald.

Gerald McDermott died on December 26, 2012, in Los Angeles. He had been battling a long illness, deciding to convalesce in New Mexico at the edge of a Navajo reservation after his last trip to Paris, settle his affairs in L.A., and return to France in six months time. His body just gave out.

He was determined to live in Paris for good. In May 2012 he arrived here completely convinced he’d be here full time. When I went to see him at his temporary digs after the first couple days he’d arrived, the door was opened by Gerald. In a wheelchair.

I was flabbergasted. He’d been hobbling around on a cane the previous year during our oyster feast but I’d assumed he’d continue his physical therapy so he’d be a bit more mobile.

“Things didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped,” he said. “But I’m here.”

Paris isn’t the most wheelchair-friendly city on earth. For the next month I helped wheel him around Paris, grocery shopping, cashing travelers checks, buying art supplies, going out for meals and art shows. And looking for oyster restaurants.

We established a routine when I’d arrive in the early afternoon to help him run some errands. First we’d have a small glass of wine and plan what he needed to do for the day. Then I’d roll him out into the hallway in front of the elevator (a typical Parisian lift, barely big enough for one person and a baguette). He’d stand up, take two steps inside, take the folded wheelchair and close the door. I’d race three floors down the stairs and meet him just as the doors were opening. Upon returning, we’d reverse the routine and I’d wheel him back into his apartment.

All through the routine and the entire time out, Gerald always talked of what he’d do here in France.

“I’d like to go back to the south for a while,” he said. “I lived there a long time ago, after I got the Caldecott. I always thought I’d be back.”

He never complained about his handicap. He assumed he’d be back on his feet, more or less, and wander the streets of Paris, looking at her buildings, soaking up her museums, eating her cheeses, drinking her wine. He had a Frenchman’s love for wine, cheese, and saucisson.

Paris was going to be his inspiration for getting back to work. He began drawing on the cheap sketch pads I’d leave around the apartment before I left. Wild animals running hither and thither, images from his imagination. One he showed me was some sort of rodent in medieval clothing pulling a wheeled cart with another rodent riding in the back.

“Do you recognize it?” he asked. “That’s you…pulling me around in a wheelchair.”

One evening I took him to a gallery opening. We bundled him into a taxi and drove to a small gallery in Beaubourg, near Les Halles. Greeted as an honored guest, he held court with a small crowd of well-wishers, outshining the artist on exhibition. Gerald was surrounded by his Parisian friends.

We shared a lot of meals then. We’d gossip about all kinds of things: life, art, books, people we knew. He talked of his long mentorship with Joseph Campbell. During that time Gerald would bring his latest ideas and sketches to Campbell and they’d talk about what the focus should be on a particular passage in the myth. Afterwards, as Gerald would explain, “Joe would ask me if I wanted a drink, ‘straight up or ruined,’ he’d say.”

There was a history between us. I’d met him back in 1976 when I was apprenticing with Mercer Mayer. We saw each other during various stages of our lives, tumultuous relationships and careers, moving from Connecticut to California (me to Redding, him to Los Angeles), and our latest writing and illustrating projects. We’d meet at trade shows and conferences and swap stories, sharing a coffee in L.A., a glass of wine in Redding, or a margarita on Cinco de Mayo in San Diego.

He was a fighter, always in the midst of reinventing himself. In the shifting landscape of children’s literature, he shifted as well. Each myth he illustrated encapsulated the essence of each culture, but always with atypical mediums: pen and ink, pastel, colored pencil, watercolor, collage, fabric paint. He began as a filmmaker, then moved to picture books, and, in the last few years, theater.

It was when I moved to Paris that I saw another, deeper creative side to Gerald. He was researching a book, poking around the old rooms of the Musée de Cluny. He discovered, or rediscovered, Odilon Redon on a visit to the Musée d’Orsay. He experimented with some printmaking as well.

But most of all he was a storyteller. He was one of the few artists living that continued the venerable tradition of passing on the old stories from generation to generation. He captured the heart and soul of each myth he illustrated. His writing process was jotting down a few lines of the myth and then walking around the room reciting them over and over again, changing the words slightly here and there and listening to them until they was distilled down to only a few, grasping the heart of the myth in its simplest form. Then he’d create the art, borrowing symbols and images from the myth’s culture. But there would always be some part of Gerald in there, some wink or nod that said, “This is serious stuff, but not too serious. Let’s have some fun.”

My last e-mail from him was in October where he was convalescing with a view of the Sandia Mountains in his beloved New Mexico (“although I still can’t figure out why the Spaniards called them ‘watermelons,’” he wrote). He still looked forward to his “bonne vie Française.” He loved Paris, even with its lopsided sidewalks and inability to tolerate the handicapped. He felt at home there.

I’ll miss him.

And not only during the months with an “r.”

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Peter Sís holding his Hans Christian Andersen medal. Photo by Milada Fiserova.

I was illustrating before I knew what illustrating means. And I knew Hans Christian Andersen stories before I knew who he was.

I was always drawing because I was a child growing up in the age before television, computers, and iPhones. I did not know anything about the size of my country or the politics of the time. I was told stories and fairy tales by my grandparents, parents, and other relatives. It all became one wonderful story really: “The Magic Tinderbox,” my grandfather’s trip to America, and my father’s adventures in Tibet. It was not until much later that I found out my grandfather had designed railways in America, my father really traveled to Tibet, and the haunting fairy tales I loved were written by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Karel Jaromír Erben, Božena Němcová, and many others.

My mother, an artist, was always making sure I had paper and pencils. And I drew pictures as early as I can remember and on every surface possible — newspapers, walls, light switches, chairs, and even the door of our fridge.

It was time to grow up and go to school, and my drawing came in handy. Fellow students liked me because of my funny drawings of them, but the teachers were less impressed (especially in the science classes). So it was determined, as was the custom then, that at age fifteen I would be a student at the art school.

At the Middle School of Applied Arts, I was supposed to be painting realistic flowers and fruit while I was instead drawing pictures of the Beatles and their Yellow Submarine. I did not fit the expectations of the serious artist at that time. I had doubts about my future until Jiří Trnka picked up my portfolio when selecting five students for his new class at the Academy of Applied Arts in the spring of 1968. Now this was special! Jiří Trnka, the most amazing artist, illustrator, and filmmaker, would be my mentor! And freedom was in the air! Prague, spring 1968, was the best time of my life. We could play rock music and stage avant-garde theater, grow long hair, draw Beatles, and travel outside the country.

It all came to a crashing end in August while I was visiting Denmark, of all places. While many of my generation were trying to get out of Czechoslovakia, I was trying to return home to Prague. Jiří Trnka was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1968, but could not get to the IBBY congress in Switzerland that year because of politics and tanks in the streets of Prague. He died in 1969 at the young age of fifty-nine, some say because of sadness about what happened to Czechoslovakia. Still, I had a year to learn from him. I wanted to make films like him. He wanted me to be an illustrator. “Too many producers telling you what to do in film,” he warned me. “To be a good illustrator you must be a true artist — and that is hard — and it can get very lonely sometimes.”

But I was making films, and they could take me places. Filmmaking gave me the chance to attend the Royal College of Art in London where Quentin Blake, yet another Hans Christian Andersen Award laureate (2002), tutored me in the department of illustration. I remember I asked him what color to use as the background for the picture I was working on, and he said something very different from what I would hear in the Central European tradition: “Just think what is the color you want — deep down you know — you are just asking me because you want to be sure.”

Still, I was no illustrator, even though I had done pictures for a book here and there. An animated film I made won the Golden Bear Award at the West Berlin Film Festival, and Hollywood and the world of film were calling. I was sent to America in 1982 to make an animated short for the summer Olympic Games. First it was all great — palm trees and swimming pools — and then it did not go so well, because the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries decided to boycott the Olympics. I was ordered to go back. What to do? I stayed to finish the film. But there was no use for it in the end! So here I was, out of a job, out of my country, when, just like in a good fairy tale, a third Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration recipient comes to the rescue. Maurice Sendak, upon seeing my work, agrees to introduce me to the publishing world! He asked: “So — you want to be an illustrator? Are you sure?” / Oh I was sure–I was desperate… / He continued: “It is not just for your glory as an artist. You are responsible to the children. You have to be truthful and remember what you wished for when you were growing up.”

You can follow your dream…but follow the dream of every child as much as you can…

And this is when I became an illustrator. First making pictures for other people’s books, then coming up with my own stories—about my childhood, about leaving home, and about exploring the world. I found out that one doesn’t have to discover new continents, that people can explore in their minds even when locked in a prison cell, and that books can be my home, my language, my country. I can share with my children and children of the world the universe of dreamers, seekers, and people who dared to think differently. Books are bridges taking you places…

One of the first bridges for children was built by the Czech educator and philosopher Jan Ámos Komenský. His was the first illustrated book for children in the Western world: Orbis Pictus, published in the seventeenth century. It was teaching people how to live together in peace…teaching language, building bridges…

I grew up near the Charles Bridge in Prague — a bridge with ancient statues where many people have walked through many ages…and where I believed as a boy I could meet all of them on a full moon night…

Mozart…Galileo…Darwin…Saint-Exupéry…

Oh…do I see Mr. Andersen with his tall hat over there?

Thank you, Mr. Andersen.

Thank you, my mentors…I know that all of you have walked here.

Thank you for showing me the way.

I am trying to do the same thing.

Thank you, Jella Lepman, for building “A Bridge of Children Books” many years ago.

Thank you, IBBY — for building the bridges — all over the planet.

Adapted from Peter Sís’s 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Illustrator Award speech. This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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He is best known for his long-running and beloved boy detective series Encyclopedia Brown. The series was honored with a special Edgar Award in 1976 and inspired both a comic strip (1978-1980) and a television show (1989). Sobol’s twenty-eighth Encyclopedia Brown book will be published by Penguin in October 2012.

Sobol’s more than eighty books include children’s novel Secret Agents Four (1967) in addition to adult fiction and nonfiction.

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Photo by Catherine Wink.

Chris wakes up at five o’clock in the morning and prepares breakfast according to plan: Monday — eggs; Tuesday — cereal; Wednesday — oatmeal. At six thirty he wakes our son, Ingo, and after breakfast they eventually leave the house together. Ingo turns east to cross Central Park to go to school and Chris walks north along the Hudson River to his studio. Every day at the same spot, opposite a certain lamppost, he leans over the wide wooden rail to check the progress of the tide, which, he will tell you, fluctuates by about one hour per day.

Chris’s habits are as regular as the tide. The organization of each day is the key to his productivity. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” One manifestation of Chris’s daily work habits is his collection of sixty-five sketchbooks spanning twenty-six years.

The first sketchbook is dated 1986, two years after we were married. At 8½ by 11 inches, it is one of the largest, a black hardcover with unlined white pages. At the start of the book, he was working part-time as a lawyer’s assistant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a job he took to free up time for art after a wrenching decision to give up his spot in the freshman class at the University of Michigan Medical School. By the final pages we were living in New York, where I was teaching and he was pursuing art at a worktable in the living room of our small one-bedroom apartment. As I adjusted to my new job, he took on most of the domestic chores that year. Tucked among the sketchbook’s drawings is a grocery list: 1 dozen eggs, 2 frozen piecrusts, 1 loaf bread.

The notebooks also hold quotes from whatever Chris is reading — such as favorite poets like Elizabeth Bishop or W. H. Auden — as well as scenes of daily life in watercolor, pencil, and ink. Like all of his notebooks, number thirty-five, from 2006, shows a continuous evolution of style. It looks like he was on a Picasso kick that year, and next to pencil studies of Picasso’s cubist compositions are words from the master: “To repeat is to run counter to spiritual laws … Copying others is necessary, but what a pity to copy oneself!” A nod to cubism can be found in Chris’s work: in the skewed facial features in I Pledge Allegiance and in the face of the Can’t Sleep moon.

The sketchbooks contain all the beginnings of Chris’s picture books. In notebook fifty-five, spring 2010, he was still experimenting with loose roughs of a small white dog. One page is covered with titles: “The Ball,” “Two Balls,” “My Best Ball,” “Daisy’s Ball.” An ink drawing of a dog drowning in water seems to allude to work-related stress with its tagline “dream.”

Another studio shelf holds a jumbled box of book dummies. To me, the dummies are the most precious items in the studio, and I sometimes badger Chris to preserve them better. These miniatures are raw inspiration-on-the-page, and I often like them better than the polished final products. Each book is handcrafted in a variety of binding and stitching patterns. The texts are hand-lettered with a Raphael 8404 paintbrush, his favorite. Once, after an art director had handed back a dummy filled with the dreaded editorial sticky notes, Chris removed the stickies and transferred the comments directly onto the dummy pages with red paint, as if to take control of his work again.

I also like the studio scrap pile. Characteristically, the scraps have a specific place, the bottom drawer of the flat file. Chris cuts his art rejects into small squares and collects them, loose, in handmade portfolios—folders fashioned from butterboard, bookcloth, and fine papers, and secured with cotton tape ties. Each square has a fragment of picture-book art — a rabbit’s ear or a little black crow — on one side and a blank side that is perfectly usable for new drawings on the other. These portfolios become picture-logs of solo or family trips to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Singapore, or Rome. When we stay with someone we know, he’ll remove a sketch and prop it by the nightstand as a surprise gift for our host.

A dislike of waste and a penchant for order characterized Chris’s childhood in a Chicago suburb. His Viennese mother sorted Legos by color and size, and she rotated breakfast foods according to a schedule. The family went camping on summer vacations to save money for occasional trips to Europe, and his thrifty mother darned the family’s socks. In this orderly setting, Chris’s interests were supported. He kept a succession of salamanders, turtles, and even a baby caiman in a large tank in the kitchen. He took art classes and played viola and recorder.

In his studio, Chris tends snails in a tank and twenty-six cacti on the windowsill. If something breaks, he mends it — a teapot, a chair, the leather handle of an old briefcase. He sewed a waterproof cover for his bicycle seat out of a plaid Chinatown bag. As he works, he listens to music on the radio. He is big on schedules, like a year-at-a-glance pie chart. It’s a ring divided into twelve sections with images from the books he plans to be working on drawn in each wedge. Some people draw or paint to generate order: Chris creates order to release wobbly, unrestricted lines.

When he is in the midst of a project, Chris fixates on things he will need, like trees or hair or yellow windows burning in the dark. For his latest book, he’s been watching kids on bikes. He studies the way a helmet appears to overbalance a small child’s body, the chunky sneakers on the pedals, and the sense of pride in the upright posture.

Chris doesn’t confine sketching to a nine-to-five schedule, like the rest of his workday. He always travels with paint, brush, notebook, and a small bottle of water. At church, he used to draw detailed mazes to keep Ingo from getting restless during the sermon. Once I watched as he eyed a small child one pew over who held a fistful of crayons. She was absorbed in her drawing, and Chris was engrossed by her art-induced hypnosis. Before my eyes she morphed into a Raschka drawing.

At the risk of over-quoting a muse, here’s one more from Picasso: “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways.” Chris cuts down on distractions in a dozen little ways. By checking e-mail only once or twice a week, he generates less e-mail and is able to preserve more time for work. One of his maxims is: “Do the most important thing first.” Art and writing therefore take place in the morning. The order in which lesser tasks happen is left to fate, sometimes literally, by tossing a paper cube with a task stamped on each side, among them MAIL, FILE, CALL, LOG. Afternoons are for buying art supplies or visiting editors by bike or on foot.

I’m a person who gets immersed in one project at a time, so I admire Chris’s ability to stop one thing in the middle and start another. He wrote the first draft of Seriously, Norman!, his first novel for children, over the course of one year in strict two-hour morning sessions. He began by walking with no fixed destination in the vicinity of the library, which did not open until nine o’clock. By the time he sat down to work he had sentences in his head ready for the page. He wrote with an HB pencil in one of a series of slim black notebooks from Muji, the artsy Japanese stationery store. At eleven he packed everything up, rode his bike to the studio, paused for coffee, then switched to painting.

Like every artist, Chris gets stalled. This happens surprisingly often for someone who has completed sixty-three picture books. “I can’t remember how to draw,” he’ll say after returning home from the studio, or, “I can’t find the right style.” Restless, he’ll wake at three or four instead of five and read in the living room. To reopen channels of creative work he’ll “shake up the schedule,” as he calls it, with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look intently at Chinese paintings, or he’ll stop at the St. Agnes Library book sale on Amsterdam and 81st Street to comb the shelves for art books by Bonnard or Klee or J.M.W. Turner.

When the Caldecott committee called on a Monday morning in January, Chris was on his way to work as usual. I happened to accompany him that day, and that’s why neither of us was home to receive the call. Chris had left his cell phone at the studio, so he was totally unreachable. We were down by the river. He had pulled me to the water’s edge to lean over the wide wooden rail to check the tide, which, like a disciplined creative life, leaves a lasting and visible pattern on the shore.

Chris Raschka’s picture book A Ball for Daisy won the 2012 Caldecott Medal. Read his acceptance speech in the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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That "Gantos boy," in full Norvelt mode.

Jack Gantos knocks people out with his comedy. Literally. I know of two speaking gigs where he has done so. In each instance, Jack was riffing away in the spotlight at the front of a school auditorium, wowing the crowd with a spoken rendition of his short story “Purple” from Jack’s New Power: Stories from a Caribbean Year, the second book in the cycle featuring his alter ego, Jack Henry.

In gory detail, this story depicts the character’s battle with a nasty plantar wart on his foot. Blood is gushing from the get-go, starting with the headless-chicken chase in the opening scene — so you have some idea of what you are in for. I know how it is for an audience huddled in a darkened auditorium with Jack up there swinging his cat: you can’t believe what you’re hearing, but you can’t stop listening, either.

As Jack the speaker got to the crowning (and gushing) moment, where kid Jack is gripping and ripping the wart from his foot with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers, there came a crash from the back of the room heard over the howls and laughs of the rest of the audience. Both times, it was the sound of a squeamish kid fainting dead away, slumping to the ground from his or her seat.

That’s what I call powerful storytelling. And these were just listeners. There’s no telling how many readers have been knocked for a loop by this guy.

I know I was, when I first read him. In August 1992, his agent kindly sent me the manuscript for Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade, the first Jack Henry book. I say “kindly” because I was just a toothless minnow in the food chain at FSG and have no memory of how she got my name. Jack had been writing picture books up till then, mainly the Rotten Ralph series, and this was his first longer work of fiction for middle-graders.

I still remember gut-laughing my way through his manuscript — and doing so every time I reread it. For me, as for many, the tears from laughter flow even more freely than the blood in Jack Gantos’s pages. From that first laugh onward, I knew this was an author I had to carry the torch for.

I also remember the day when our first review came in, a starred one by Michael Cart in School Library Journal. Cheeze-us-crust! It was a whip-smart analysis with a snappy sentence that nails the all-important aspect of so many of the characters Jack has created: “[Jack Henry’s] a survivor, an ‘everyboy’ whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane and generous.”

Jack Gantos writes for the “everyboy” in all of us, regardless if we are boy or girl. His books are all about heart and heartlessness, spirit and the absence thereof, sanity and insanity. His kids are often appealingly hapless yet heroic in unexpected ways, wacky blends of ordinary and extraordinary. They are adolescents still insulated in their own unique, somewhat cracked view of the world. They are smart kids and suckers at the same time, hopeful, bursting with schemes that are off the wall and ill advised, but they are never afraid to press ahead (Joey Pigza and the pencil sharpener, anyone?). They are often placed in extreme situations by the people who are supposed to protect and guide them, and so they frequently become more grown-up than the adults who rule their lives.

To get a handle on what makes Gantos tick, all you need to do is crack the spine on any of his books, because he has thrown gobs of his own history and personality into his protagonists. His personal story is always the clay with which he works.

This is true of the audacious self-portrait he paints in his YA memoir Hole in My Life. It’s the story of how he screwed up big-time as a young man by agreeing to help transport two thousand pounds of hashish to New York City. He got caught, went to prison, and found his way out, in large part because of his dedication to going to college and becoming a writer.

But the picture-book character Rotten Ralph is just as autobiographical. He’s the naughty red cat who embodies kid-id in everything he does, causing upheaval and trouble on every page. It can’t be all coincidence that Gantos wrote the first Rotten Ralph story just a short while after earning his release from prison, expressing a wish-fulfillment for any pent-up soul: wouldn’t it be great to not be afraid to push a few buttons, test some boundaries, and screw up now and then, always with the security of having somebody there like Ralph’s owner Sarah to catch you when you go too far?

Jack Henry and Joey Pigza are two other characters also prone to testing boundaries, and they share a lot more with the author than a four-letter first name. The author disguise may be thinner with Jack Henry, but both characters embody their creator’s indomitable spirit and refusal to follow a straight and narrow path. Jack Henry is a kid whose frequent setbacks never stop him from striving to get out of whatever compromising situation he’s painted himself into, even if it means getting stained head to toe with gentian violet as treatment for blood poisoning brought on by self-surgery with rusty pliers. Joey Pigza is a boy whose three main challenges — his mom, his dad, and his ADHD — run him ragged but never wear him out. He and aspiring-author Jack Henry are hilarious observers of the world around them; in their narrations, they persistently capture those special little details that put a whacked-out magical spin on things.

In Dead End in Norvelt, the author certainly puts a whacked-out magical spin on his western Pennsylvania childhood, transforming it into an amazing tapestry. The real Jack Gantos is very much that “Gantos boy” in the book in many biographical particulars, but not all. Jack grew up in Norvelt, was an awful nosebleeder, worshiped Eleanor Roosevelt, had a dad who snagged a Piper J-3 Cub airplane in a poker game, and knew a woman who was the direct inspiration for the amazing Miss Volker. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s made up. What’s fact and what’s fiction isn’t important. All that matters is that it’s all believable in one way or another, starting with the comedy.

One of many LOL moments in Norvelt comes in the opening pages, when Jack has been loaned out by his mother to help an elderly neighbor. On first arriving at her house, Jack witnesses Miss Volker boiling her hands in a pot on the flaming stove and then — as if that’s not bad enough (and “bad enough” is never enough with Gantos) — pulling her cooked hands out and, apparently, chewing off her skin. Cue fainting kid! In some kind of meta-moment, Jack Gantos the author uses his faint-inducing powers to zap his fictional self, knocking Jack Gantos out.

When the real Jack brings fictional Jack back to life, he doesn’t let the flesh-eating old biddy scare his boy off. He stays put. He recognizes a good thing when he sees it. He senses in an instant that this old gal, completely certifiable in some ways, is his ticket to knowledge and adventure. Especially since he’s been grounded for the summer and has nothing better to do.

It’s not all just fun and games with the real Jack. He loves to double you up, if not knock you out, with his outrageousness. And then when he’s got you right where he wants you, he uses the humor to push you into thinking differently about something. It can be a simple thing, such as the importance of not letting the embarrassment of being painted purple get the better of you. But it can also be something darker and deeper, up to and including that darkest and deepest of subjects, mortality.

In the first pages of Norvelt, young Gantos is playing war with his father’s souvenir Japanese sniper rifle. Some bloody funny things result right away, of course, and it’s the first of many moments where death and dying are dealt with in an almost playful manner. After all, it’s a novel about history, in which death and dying go hand in hand with dates and dictators.

But then comes a classic Gantos jolt. In the closing act of the book, that same rifle reappears, and a death happens that is shocking and sad and anything but playful. A confession: at first, I tried to talk Jack out of killing the deer after already bumping off all those poor elderly Norvelters—but he knew better and convinced me that there needed to be one serious death in the book. Not only does it give young Jack a chance to show off what he’s learned from Miss Volker about writing obituaries, but it makes all the other deaths in the book so much more resonant.

Publisher John Newbery — another guy who liked to surprise his audience — had a thing for the work of funny writers. One of the first books he brought out, way back in 1740, bore a title that began Miscellaneous Works Serious and Humerous (the silly spelling is his, not mine). He also published eighteenth-century wag Samuel Johnson, and the books he created for children were far more entertaining than such things had ever been before. So Mr. Newbery would have been amused and gratified to know that the ninety-first medal handed out in his name has been given this year to one of the most seriously “humerous” writers at work today.

Jack Gantos’s book Dead End in Norvelt won the 2012 Newbery Medal. Read his acceptance speech in the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Photo: Gary Spector

By Shane W. Evans

As I sit down to write this, I watch the sun fall below the horizon and my spirits rise.

There is the sound of LIFE all around me: birds chirping, the roar of vehicles, the faint exchanges of words between neighbors, and children’s laughter in the air. I am encouraged and thankful on this Sunday, having shared my day at a small church called True Light established by Pastor Alice directly across from my Dream Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. We thanked GOD on this day for an extraordinary community as we gathered, ALL shapes, sizes, and situations, to make a JOYFUL noise.

Give us this day … our DAILY bread … a prayer that I say every day, recognizing the importance of the “US” in the asking, that we all have what we need.

Here I am today! Again, thankful and asking that we all have the bread that we need to sustain us for this day. There are many to thank: my family, wife, daughter, mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and community. I have been inspired through their constant encouragement, prayer, and support. I want to thank all of those who helped to make Underground the book that you have chosen to honor: the publisher, Roaring Brook Press; my editor, Neal Porter, a man who trusts his vision as well as the vision of the artists he works with; Rebecca Sherman of Writers House, for sharing her passion for this work and finding this story a home; ALA and the Coretta Scott King committee, for going on this journey honoring the “voice on a page” with this amazing award; and to ALL of you for honoring authors and illustrators through the reading and sharing of our books.

I know that many artists and illustrators work tirelessly to “get the story right” … the facts of the matter. There are details in the history (our story) that can often be traced by other voices of the past through reference and research. For this book I wanted to reach back to that “original place” in my imagination that I would grab from when I was a child. A wonderful place where I mostly like to engage in the “happier” things in life, although always knowing that imagination is not bound only to that place. I have had to imagine, as an illustrator, things not so pleasant, feelings and situations that I would like to avoid at all costs…And here I am today, because I wanted to start with “The Darkness.”

I imagine that in my lifetime I have had thousands of sheets of paper pass through my hands with a crayon or a pencil making a “joyful mark,” telling a story of a sun in the corner and green grass below. I have also drawn heroes who could fly through the sky with capes blowing in the wind. I suppose there is a time and a place for everything.

There was a day some seven years ago or so when I found myself on a train in Japan, of all places. There was something about this moment that made me say to myself, “PICK UP THAT PENCIL and DRAW…” A command to begin the journey. There are times as an artist when I have to trust the process; sort of let go and let the light shine from within, even when the subject matter is dark. As I put the pencil to the pad, I remember that feeling that I had as a child, loving the resistance, the sound, and the outcome of line, and this was happening right before my very eyes. All of the sudden on this pad of paper there was a MAN and a WOMAN and they were READY. It did not matter who they were. It mattered more that they were ready FOR FREEDOM! As the pages turned I really began to cheer these people on, and then I knew the reality that I would have to have them face. The hardships, the moments of despair, the ups and the downs of a LONG road that was not defined by a date in time, beginning or end. I knew that these people were real and that they are real. I have seen many people today LONGING for freedom. I have made a conscious effort to not make comparisons, so it is safe to say that there are many definitions for the word FREEDOM as every journey is distinctly different. In some way we have ALL sought freedom. Ask yourself, “What is freedom?” Many of us cannot imagine, and do not want to imagine, a place and time in which people would need to STEAL AWAY to freedom. I have to say that we do not have to look very far to see that this remains with us. The spirit of this “Underground” never died; it transformed with the times.

We can see, based on our own experience, when we are READY for freedom, and we will seek with our hearts first, and this will open the path. It is when the words are first spoken, “I am seeking freedom,” that you will find someone listening who is seeking the same and who might reply, “Well, I have heard of a way…” The next thing you know, you are MOVING your feet on the path to freedom. You have sought the escape and the quiet, engaged the fear, you have run, crawled, rested, made new friends along the way, lost something in the process, felt the overwhelming tiredness, and yet YOU rose like the sun, recognizing how FAR you have come to be RIGHT HERE. This is ALL of our stories. This is the American story, one that is NOT necessarily about riding off into a brilliant sunset knowing that you will be okay. Perhaps in this story just seeing that sunset on your OWN terms means more than anything else at that particular moment. So it is in many ways ironic that I set the stage for this LOVING family at the conclusion of this book facing the RISING sun, yet knowing that if I were to continue drawing the next pages there might be darkness in the ongoing struggle to true freedom. We, as illustrators and authors, often need to depict characters who experience the darkness as well as the light.

And here we are TODAY… together—celebrating both “The Darkness” and “The Light” inside stories. This is the reason why we are here. To celebrate the characters who are on this stage called life. All of us here today stand for our yesterdays. It is today that we can pick which page of the story we want to be on and what role we want to play in this plot. Are we seeking freedom? Are we looking to help someone to freedom? Are we looking to take someone’s freedom away? And are we seeking the light?

Many thousands traveled along a path we call the Underground Railroad. We may never know how each of them would describe his or her journey to freedom. Their voices were not chronicled in a book that illuminated their steps. I am certain today that I am feeling the stories of yesterday in my heart through my brothers and sisters today, both the stories of darkness and of light. The mothers who encouraged the steps, the fathers who shined a light on the path, the brothers who held their sisters’ hands, the aunties and uncles who shared a voice of guidance, the family and friends who held you up to the STARS that guided the way. We are HERE TODAY because they were READY FOR FREEDOM. I AM READY FOR FREEDOM. Thank you.

Shane W. Evans is the winner of the 2012 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Underground, published by Neal Porter Books, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press. His acceptance speech was delivered at the annual conference of the American Library Association in Anaheim, California, on June 24, 2012. From the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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By Kadir Nelson

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here with you to celebrate the work of African American authors and illustrators whose books have been chosen as the best of the best of 2011. I feel privileged to share the company of esteemed peers whom I have long admired.

I have always considered myself a painter, and have only recently begun to don the hat of an author. So I feel all the more honored to be recognized for my writing efforts by the Coretta Scott King committee. To have my work acknowledged by librarians who link good books with avid readers thrills me beyond measure. Thank you all for serving our youth in this noble way.

For much of my life and career I have been engaged in the pursuit of truth — about myself, about my family, about those whose histories bear similarities to my own. The African American story was one that most resonated with me and became my primary focus. For most Americans, this piece of history has often sat in the shadows, left to be discovered only by those whose curiosity would lead them to search deeper, beyond the generic survey of history we are generally fed in our classrooms. I knew the American and African American stories only as well as most Americans, and having both African and European blood in my veins, I felt a strong pull to learn them on a deeper, more personal level. American history is often presented in a one-dimensional, picturesque, and patriotic fashion that leaves students with a rather lacking impression of the African American story. This was certainly my experience. However, as I took on projects that expanded my understanding of American history, I discovered that the “sidebar” treatment of African American history was inaccurate and gravely inadequate.

This became crystal-clear to me during a visit to the United States Capitol building in Washington, DC, in 2008. Displayed inside the building’s famous rotunda are several large paintings that were created to tell the story of how America was founded. There are images of gallant soldiers on battlefields, our proud forefathers signing the Declaration of Independence, the end of the American Revolution, and so on. These massive paintings are filled with an all-star cast of early Americans, Europeans, and Native Americans. They are quite striking and beautiful. However, just as striking is the fact that there are no representations of African Americans. Not one. For those who know better, this omission and the reason for it is obvious. The stain of slavery and its integral part in America’s story might provoke questions about a proud country that was founded on the premise of freedom and yet held a large segment of its inhabitants in bondage. And rather than expose this paradox and inconvenient truth, the artists decided to — or were instructed to — simply leave it out.

I wondered what the psychological impact of such a slight would be upon the multitudes of children who visit the Capitol building every year. I concluded that it would make them feel the way I felt: that my story and that of my ancestors didn’t matter. As a result of my visit, I resolved to delve into that story, find my place in it, and share it through my work.

I began by looking no further than my own proverbial doorstep: I called my grandmother. For many years she and most of my elders were tight-lipped about the past — and for good reason. There are dark parts of American history that can be a heavy burden on young ears, and my elders were careful about what they shared so as not to weigh us down with grievances. However, I think that as time passed, stories that had been considered shameful began to lose their bite. In 2010, Michele Norris from NPR’s All Things Considered noted that with the joyful election of Barack Obama, elder African Americans felt a bit safer to share their stories. I tend to agree with her. The struggles of our ancestors seemed to have served a purpose and found relevance with the election of one of America’s darker sons.

And so my grandmother shared her story with me. She spoke about her husband, my grandfather, whom I never met; about her father; and about the last slave in our family, a man who refused to celebrate New Year’s Day with the traditional meal of black-eyed peas because of a painful childhood association. I found that by learning her previously untold story, I was able to put our family story into greater context. I began to interview other family members and friends. I heard tales of great world wars, labor disputes, factory accidents, and civil rights demonstrations. It was through these stories and history that the larger American story came alive. It’s one thing to read a history book filled with names, dates, and facts, but it is entirely another to hear these stories directly from people who lived them. For me that is the most compelling way to learn and share history.

As an artist, my primary means of telling stories has almost always been through paintings. Although the story of Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans is shared through the spoken word, the visual story here is just as important. Heart and Soul is illustrated with more than forty original paintings, many of which are reminiscent of old family photos and early American art. As with any other project that is dear to my heart, I took great care to create artwork that is consistent with the power and grace of the story. I planned, as I had with my last series, to create large paintings that could fill each spread and eventually museum walls. However, as my deadline approached, those paintings grew smaller and smaller — but only in size. Some of the images have painted frames around them, which serve as a metaphor: this massive American story is literally “framed” by the intimate family story of the narrator. We purposely gave the cover of the book the appearance of an old family album or scrapbook for the same reason. It is a humble entreaty to readers to pick up this book and run their fingers over the cover. An experience that no e-book can ever offer. As picture books are often the very first encounter that children have with art, I feel that we, as creators of illustrated books, owe it to them to make it a meaningful one.

Now, as a youth, I was not a lover of history, nor was I a big fan of reading. So it is not a little ironic that I would grow up to become an author who writes about history.

My mother can tell you that it was quite the chore to get me to read as a child. And surely getting me to read about history was an even greater task. Every author knows that the prerequisite to being an author is to read — a lot. I was not interested in that assignment, and yet I really loved to listen to stories. I would soon make the connection that history can be looked at as a string of personal stories.

It wasn’t until I reached the tenth grade that I read a book I couldn’t put down: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It would spur me on to become a lover of nonfiction and biographies. As a result of that experience, I looked forward with excitement to finding the next great book, the next great story.

Shortly after having published my first book as an author/illustrator, and almost twenty years after reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, that story would present itself to me inside the rotunda of our nation’s Capitol building, and from the recollections of my grandmother, my mother, aunts, uncles, and dear friends. I would construct a narrative that spoke to the individual and collective stories of families like mine, and then weave them into the greater context of the American story. America is a very large family, made up of millions of smaller families. All of which have their own stories to tell, and, when combined, tell the larger history with which we are all familiar.

Heart and Soul is a historical document that tells the story of America through the recollections of a century-old African American woman whose family story is closely tied to the greater American story. Her words and style of speech are reminiscent of both my grandmother, Verlee Gunter-Moore, who speaks with honesty and directness, and a sweet Texan by the name of Debbie Allen. Together their voices are merged into one very warm and sincere narrator who tells her story as though she were grandmother to us all.

Heart and Soul is not the definitive history of America and African Americans, but rather a starting point, a launching pad for readers of all ages to uncover the truth for themselves, so that when they sit in their classrooms or visit our national monuments and museums, they will understand that their stories do, in fact, matter. For we are all our nation’s heart and soul. Thank you.

Kadir Nelson is the winner of the 2012 Coretta Scott King Author Award for Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. His acceptance speech was delivered at the annual ALA conference in Anaheim, California, on June 24, 2012. From the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Photo: Bill McGuinness

By Ashley Bryan

To be honored in the name of Virginia Hamilton, a person and artist I loved, opens personal feelings and the meaning of her lifetime achievement award. Virginia remains an ongoing inspiration in my life. I have recollections of time spent with her when the warmth and light of her personality enriched those moments. By written word and presence, Virginia sought to close distances, to describe the other as a recognition of oneself.

This is what engages me now. What does a lifetime achievement award mean to me and to each one of you? What does an award that seems so final mean when one is alive and absorbed in the ongoing daily effort to discover and offer something meaningful and creative of oneself? There are many ways in which we create and touch the lives of others.

Lifetime achievement may be considered progressive as it develops throughout one’s life. For example, as a kindergartener in a New York City public school, way back in the 1930s, I was taught the alphabet. My teacher asked the class to draw a picture for each letter from A to Z. We then sewed the pages together. The teacher said, “You have just published an alphabet book. You are the author, illustrator, binder. Take it home. You are distributor as well.” Oh, the awards I received then, hugs, kisses, cheers from family and friends! I was so encouraged by this applause that I have never stopped making books. First as one-of-a-kind limited edition gifts, but now my books are printed in the thousands.

Here I have offered an example of what I consider an early lifetime achievement award. When I am with schoolchildren and am asked, “Have you ever won any big awards?” I tell them of my first big awards of hugs, kisses, cheers from family and friends. I tell them you need awards of encouragement all along the way. That helps you to become the creative person that you would like to be.

These early awards are preparation for the awards received later from one’s peers for outstanding contributions one has made. Throughout her career Virginia received steady awards for her originality and artistry, yet each recognition returned her to her work, hoping to more closely approach her sought-after ideal.

The black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, writing in the late 1880s, was asked if the writing got easier as he progressed. He answered, “My work becomes harder, rather than easier as I go on, simply because I am more critical of it. I believe when an author ceases to climb, he ceases at the same time to lift his reader up with him.”

This lifting up of others was realized by Virginia Hamilton in her art. She created lives that touched ours. She helped us, through her play with language, to overcome distances and differences. I hold to that mystery of creation as a compelling ideal.

This is why the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award means so much to me. I would like this lifting up of others, through the experience of my art, to be as it was for Virginia: at the heart of all I do.

Ashley Bryan is the winner of the 2012 Coretta Scott King — Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. His acceptance speech was delivered at the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Breakfast at the annual conference of the American Library Association in Anaheim, California, on June 24, 2012.

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