Original cover art by Oge Mora. Horn Book Fanfare: Our choices for the best books of 2020. Coverage of the 2020 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards virtual celebration: judges’ remarks, speeches, photos. Kathleen T. Horning interviews Leslie Brody, author of the Louise Fitzhugh biography Sometimes You Have to Lie. An update on the CCBC’s diversity statistics from Madeline Tyner. Gregory Maguire remembers Jill...
Welcome to Fanfare, our choices of the best books of 2020. When The Horn Book’s tiny office went from wall-to-wall books, ARCs, effin’ jeez, and piles and piles of still more books to fully remote, there was a lot of uncertainty. Overnight, our digital tag line — It’s virtually a...
’Twas the holiday issue, and all across Boston... the remote-working Horn Bookers were writing reviews of recommended new and reissued Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas books. (See also Marjorie Ingall’s article “What Makes a Good Hanukkah Book?” in the November/December 2020 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.) Jack and Santa...
Cover art from Once upon a Winter Day by Liza Woodruff. Published by Margaret Ferguson Books/Holiday House. Elizabeth Partridge on writing as an act of defiance. A Call to Action from The Brown Bookshelf by Paula Chase, Cheryl Willis Hudson, Wade Hudson, Kelly Starling Lyons, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, and Renée Watson “to imagine a new way of doing business, and abandon anti-Black and...
Cover art from The Little Ghost Who Lost Her Boo! by Elaine Bickell, illustration copyright 2019 by Raymond McGrath. Author Emma Otheguy on COVID-19, New York City, children's books, and contradictions. Kwame Alexander, author of The Undefeated, fetes Kadir Nelson, the book's artist and winner of the Caldecott Medal and...
Dudley Carlson: The farmers’ market was a riot of color. Red and green lettuces, orange carrots, blue and purple berries, and breads in rich browns and tans stretched for two blocks. At one end, a single booth held only green. Beautiful green beans were neatly bundled and stacked like a...
I’d like to begin by thanking the 2020 Newbery Award Selection Committee, chaired by the incomparable Krishna Grady. Thank you for the tremendous honor of making New Kid the first graphic novel in your ninety-eight-year history to receive your prestigious medal. I would also like to thank the ALA for...
When I found out on January 26th that I’d won the Legacy Award, I was ecstatic. However, it didn’t take me long — about an hour! — to start fretting about my speech. That’s just the way I am. I began working on my speech right away and had a...
Good morning, or good afternoon, or good evening, depending on when or where in the world you are reading this. As I compose this speech, I am sitting at home under a nationwide quarantine in the midst of the proliferation of a remarkable novel virus that has commandeered the attention...