I began Sarah, Plain and Tall long ago in my 1790 New England house, while missing my Wyoming home. I sat in the music room with my dogs, watching my children take the school bus. I worked on a typewriter, listening to the noisy eraser cartridge slap back and forth....
Oh, I remember that evening. We were entertaining dinner guests, and the phone rang. I answered it, and listened, and then the call was over, so I returned to the table to report, except — and I remember this vividly — that the mental tape on which I had always...
Two-time winner Katherine Paterson (far right) with her family, celebrating her 1981 Newbery for Jacob Have I Loved. Photo courtesy of Katherine Paterson. Most awards are given soon after or even when they’re announced, but winners of the Newbery Medal are told on a morning in January and have until...
Susan Cooper at Pembroke College, Oxford, to give the Tolkien Lecture in 2017. Photo courtesy of Pembroke College Tolkien Lecture. The Newbery Award had no effect on my work, I believe — apart from making it temporarily harder, due to the mean little voice in one’s head that sneers: Okay,...
Welcome to the Horn Book’s special commemorative issue recognizing the centennial celebration of the John Newbery Award! On behalf of the leadership and membership of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) as well as the dedicated and hard-working members of the John Newbery 100th Anniversary Celebration Task Force,...
While I was an active writer in the 1970s and 1980s, I was invited to speak to children in many elementary schools around the country. Most of the students, in the third to sixth grades, were white. The children were interested in my work and the images that were all...
In a foreword to the paperback edition of the groundbreaking anthology Flying Lessons & Other Stories — edited by Ellen Oh, first published in 2017 in partnership with We Need Diverse Books, and dedicated to the late Walter Dean Myers — Christopher Myers writes, “Imagine…this book you are holding, Flying...
I worked for The Horn Book, Inc., in the early 2000s, back when the office was at 56 Roland Street in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Sullivan Square. As I advanced from summer intern to editorial assistant and eventually associate editor, I had a variety of tasks to do, but one of...