When Elissa Gershowitz visited the Norman Rockwell Museum this summer, she viewed the Kadir Nelson exhibit "In Our Lifetime" (on view through October 30th), which includes the original art for his historic cover of The Horn Book Magazine, created on the occasion of his 2020 Caldecott win for The Undefeated. Former Editor in...
"Tanglewood is back! This summer, for the first time since 2019, Tanglewood will offer a full season of concerts and events." My husband sings with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and this year's Beethoven's Ninth performance, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, was an especially memorable and moving one. But enough about music! While...
Kadir Nelson is the author-illustrator of The Undefeated, winner of the 2020 Randolph Caldecott Medal. Julie Danielson interviewed him by email for Calling Caldecott. Calling Caldecott: What have been some of the highlights of your Caldecott year? Kadir Nelson: I’ve been blessed with a wonderful year thus far. The news of...
Kadir Nelson is the winner of the 2020 Caldecott Medal and the 2020 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for The Undefeated, written by Kwame Alexander, who also won a Newbery Honor for the book’s text. Here, Alexander pays tribute to his creative collaborator. I gave my father, a children’s...
Who are we this time of year, without the organizing principle of the various celebrations of books and authors at ALA Annual? Usually, we’d be looking forward to the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Book Awards Breakfast, the Newbery-Caldecott-Legacy Banquet, the Pura Belpré Celebración; running into old friends on the exhibit...
Welcome to our annual ALA Awards issue. When it became clear that we would not be reopening the country anytime soon and that there would be no celebration of the ALSC and CSK awards at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago in June, I worried that there would...
Readers of The Horn Book Magazine will have heard this before: a book has the power to change a person, and a person has the power to change a book. Depending on who you are at a given time and the experiences you have collected, the understanding of a book...
Since nervously accepting the appointment of jury chair from previous Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee chair Dr. Claudette McLinn, my goal has been to continue the legacy that the Coretta Scott King Book Awards have created of identifying quality children’s literature that features various narratives of the Black experience....
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...