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Not all deserving books bring home ALA awards. Our annual Mind the Gap Awards pay tribute to our favorite books that didn’t win. Here’s how we reviewed our 2025 winners. Tove and the Island with No Address by Lauren Soloy; illus. by the author Primary Tundra 48 pp. 10/24 ...
Not all deserving books bring home ALA awards. The books that didn’t win. Misdirected Tove and the Island with No Address by Lauren Soloy Telephone of the Tree by Alison McGhee Misjudged The Judgment of Yoyo Gold by Isaac Blum Missed the bus The Yellow...
Charles George Esperanza, C. G., has a gift for illustrating stories. His choice of palette paints the plot on canvas. His brushstrokes create characters so real and relatable, you feel like you’re a part of the setting, a character in the landscape. His thoughtful execution of the stories on the...
Jason Reynolds sits on the rooftop of his DC home, overlooking the warm sunset, telling me stories of his late father riding motorcycles, and says, “Build your archive.” He wears all black and hobbles up the winding staircase carrying a smooth bottle of water. He does not walk fast. Everything...
I fell in love with Black history at a very young age. I come from a family with roots in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Detroit. A family of Black cowboys, storytellers, landowners, entrepreneurs, gin makers, community leaders, and doctors. Unfortunately, I didn’t grow up seeing these stories told in the...
Photo: Jeremy Charles. In the early days of expanding her art business, the Tree of Life Studio, into the online frontier, my friend Rebecca Lee Kunz, the 2025 Caldecott Medal winner, did what everyone did circa 2008: she started a blog. It was called An Artful Way, and its banner...
Erin and Sharon at the 2021 launch of Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey at Hockessin BookShelf in Delaware. Photo courtesy of Sharon Huss Roat. Looking back on 2024, two-time Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly will tell you it was the worst year of her life. She spent most of it undergoing...
On January 27, 2025, the Youth Media Awards were announced, as usual, during what was long known as the American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference (in recent years: LibLearnX). It seems likely that this was the last wintertime conference in that form. With so much upheaval and uncertainty (e.g., book bans,...
The last time I’d been to Philadelphia was for the American Library Association Midwinter Conference. It was January 2020, just-pre-pandemic crisis in the U.S., and turned out to be the last Midwinter conference in that form. This year’s ALA Annual Conference in Philly had its share of remembering and reminiscing but...
First, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement Jury for honoring me with this prestigious award. I humbly accept the 2025 Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. At the same time, I feel a mix of emotions, as my dear friend...