Calling Caldecott
Angie Kang’s Our Lake is a quiet, luminous meditation on grief, memory, and the enduring presence of love. When I read Our Lake, I was unexpectedly transported back to the loss of my own father, to summers on a lake in upstate New York; a grief I thought I had made...
Maria van Lieshout's Song of a Blackbird is a harrowing and hopeful story, grounded in historical events, of the Dutch Resistance during World War II. Through expressive illustrations and inventive page layouts, this graphic novel weaves documented and imagined histories; past and contemporary timelines; and several characters' narrative arcs into...
Gracey Zhang illustrates with sensitivity and subtlety Rebecca Stead's sensitive and subtle picture-book text, telling the story of a father and child's first day in a new apartment. Why have they had to move? Has it always been just the two of them? Stead leaves plenty of room for interpretation,...
Simple elements do a lot of work in Corey R. Tabor’s picture book Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saved the World), whose illustrations were “drawn on a tablet, printed out on an old laser printer, then scanned back in and colored digitally.” (Gotta love a chatty copyright page.) My eye was drawn first to the...
We asked readers to give us four titles that they thought were worthy of the Caldecott Award. Thank you to everyone who submitted comments. We will have one more round of nominations in December. Here’s what the November results showed: Twenty-three titles were nominated. Ten titles have more than one nomination....
The 2025 NYT/NYPL Best Illustrated list came out on Sunday! Here are the ten titles selected (by a panel of esteemed judges: Peter Sís, Tracey Baptiste, and children’s librarian Amber Moller): Making Art written and illustrated by Diana Ejaita Dragon Flower written and illustrated by Chen Jiang Hong; translated by Alyson Waters Broken...
Kitty and I are stunned to find ourselves here in November already! It’s time for our first-round nominations. The real Caldecott committee is beginning their nomination process, which you can learn more about in this excellent post that Julie Hakim Azzam wrote a couple years back. Here on Calling Caldecott, we’ll be doing nominations in two rounds, asking you...
Next up on my list of heavy hitters for potential Caldecott recipients is Artivist and film concept artist Nikkolas Smith. If you’re familiar with Nikkolas’s previous books and social media posts, you know that his art advocates for global change and justice for all. Typically, Smith approaches his illustrations digitally. However in his most recent title, The History of We, Smith took...
Today on Calling Caldecott, a conversation between Elisa Gall and Jonathan Hunt about informational picture books and the Caldecott Award. (This is an entry in their "why-the-hell" Calling Caldecott series. Previous posts include discussions about the Caldecott and holiday books; photography; board books; the Newbery Award; "didactic intent"; folklore; and...
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