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Ginny Moore Kruse in 1980, surrounded by some of the year's Newbery contenders. Photo: L. Roger Turner for the Wisconsin State Journal. From 1938 until 1980, the same committee (in various iterations) chose both the Newbery and Caldecott awards. In 1979 the ALSC membership voted to establish separate committees —...
Newbery Award titles are among the more visible of books for young readers. As such, they provide the opportunity to explore in microcosm a potential template that can be applied to the entire arena of books for children and teens. My book A Single Shard won the Newbery Medal in...
The Melchers at a Carnival of Books broadcast for the 1954 Newbery with winner Joseph Krumgold. Photo coutesy of the Melcher family. While my daughters and I are all avid readers who grew up enjoying award-winning children’s literature, we never had the opportunity to meet our relative, Frederic G. Melcher...
Board books don’t tend to win major awards. True, a handful have been named ALA Notable Children’s Books, including one of my all-time favorites, Global Babies by the Global Fund for Children. Many a Caldecott winner has later been republished in board book format, and some work well, notably Kevin...
When a new graphic memoir comes out, I need to read it. I can’t get enough of people’s stories about their own lives — and I love comics. What an easy hunger to satisfy nowadays as the number of books in this genre — for all age groups — continues...
At the 2016 National Book Awards, the late Congressman John Lewis, being honored for the graphic memoir March: Book Three, spoke of being turned away, along with his sisters, brothers, and cousins, from an Alabama library in 1956. “And to come here and receive this award, this honor, it’s too...
How do you read a wordless picture book? You read the pictures — and there are no air quotes around the word read. The pictures are the language and they must be read as carefully as any book with text. It’s a radical decision that an artist makes to not...
“Do what you think best.” Roger Sutton says that more often than you’d think when his coworkers ask for his opinion. Not to say he doesn’t occasionally put his foot down (“Over my dead body”), but he’s always up for discussion and debate, and he always listens. In his editorials,...
Here’s a story: George the pig is polite, conscientious, and helpful. He’s almost perfect, really, except for one flaw that seems very piglike and not unusual at all: he eats too much. So when tempted by boxes of doughnuts his mother has baked for the “Pigtown Ladies’ Popcorn Festival and...
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