Book Awards
Virginia Hamilton (left) and Mildred D. Taylor (right). Taylor photo: Jack Ackerman, The Toledo Blade. As a Black woman, African American children’s books scholar, and educator, I am dismayed that there have only been two Black women to win the Newbery Medal in its one hundred years. Virginia Hamilton was...
Every now and then, I think about a conversation I had many years ago with one of my professors. We were talking about travel. He was saying how important he thought it was to venture beyond the main tourist paths. “You don’t even have to go very far,” he said....
As I write this, I am sitting in the home of my eighty-six-year-old mother. She may be living her last months on her own — soon my siblings and I will need to make decisions. I stay here every weekend with one or both of my Dobermans, try to spend...
DiCamillo with current Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden at the banquet, 2004. Photo courtesy of the American Library Association Archives. I grew up on a dead-end street in a small town in central Florida. In the summertime, I went everywhere barefoot, and my feet were so callused that I...
Hitty Preble — protagonist of the Newbery Medal–winning novel Hitty: Her First Hundred Years — is a doll with a history. Nothing is really known about her first hundred years, of course, but much has been written about her since. Her origin story was first told in the pages of...
That year, ALA Midwinter was in Philadelphia. It was very cold. I was very cold, too. Indeed, I had a bad case of the flu, the worst I have ever had. I had been invited to the conference — the only time in my career I have attended Midwinter. The...
Illustrations created by Karen Hesse for this essay. Illustrations: Karen Hesse. What do water and sunshine mean to a weed? I was a skinny, freckle-faced ghost of a child. I had friends up and down my city block, but I was the weed in the garden. Long walks on sweltering...
In hindsight, it seems fitting that I would be contacted about the possibility of serving as chair of the 2021 John Newbery Award Selection Committee on the same day I attended a children’s literature conference in March 2019. At the time, I was a professor at Clemson University and had...
First of all, I’d like to address the Newbery-related questions I’m asked most frequently. No, the medal isn’t real gold. No, it’s too heavy to wear around my neck. No, it’s too small to frame and hang on the wall. Yes, winning it is one of the most important things...
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