Tag Archives: Newbery Award

The 2017 guide to the Newbery and Caldecott awards

The Newbery and Caldecott Awards: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books, 2017 Edition

Contact:

Rob Christopher
Marketing Coordinator
ALA Publishing
American Library Association
(312) 280-5052

CHICAGO—Updated to include the 2017 award and honor books, “The Newbery and Caldecott Awards: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books, 2017 Edition,” published by ALA Editions, gathers together the books deemed most distinguished in American children’s literature and illustration since the inception of the renowned prizes. Librarians and teachers everywhere rely on this guidebook for quick reference and collection development and also as a resource for curriculum links and readers’ advisory. With an easy-to-use streamlined look and format, the 2017 guide features:

  • a new interview with four-time Caldecott winner Bryan Collier;
  • explanations of criteria used to select the winners;
  • updated bibliographic citations and indexes for the award winners.

For more than eight decades, librarians from the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) have intensely scrutinized the children’s books published each year, selecting the winning and honor books for the Newbery and Caldecott Awards. In addition, the ALSC division of the ALA is committed to creating a nation of readers, starting with the youngest. ALSC supports all those providing library services to children, including youth librarians, teachers, families, literature experts, publishers, and child advocates.

ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library professionals worldwide. ALA Editions publishes resources used worldwide by tens of thousands of library and information professionals to improve programs, build on best practices, develop leadership, and for personal professional development. ALA authors and developers are leaders in their fields, and their content is published in a growing range of print and electronic formats. Contact ALA Editions at (800) 545-2433 ext. 5052 or editionsmarketing@ala.org.

Minnesotan winner of Newbery Award!

This week it was announced that Minnesota author Kelly Barnhill won the Newbery Medal for her book The Girl Who Drank The Moon.

This article from the St. Cloud Times describes the plot of the book, in which a village fears a witch that lives in the nearby woods and to keep her happy (so they think) they bring a newborn baby to her forest each year. But the witch is actually good, and brings the babies to be with families on the other side of the woods.

In the article, Barnhill shares how the book can easily translate to real life situations for her young readers: “This notion of rumor spreading and of getting the wrong idea about a person,” she said, “that’s like real stuff for these kids, that’s what their life is like right now.” Barnhill is a teacher in Minneapolis for a nonprofit arts organization, and really enjoys interacting with the kids that read her books, and hearing how they interpret the story.

Fox Animation has acquired the rights to The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Barnhill looks forward to the interpretation into film.

You can read about another of Barnhill’s books, The Witch’s Boy, in this article from MPR, and keep an eye out for her next novel, The Sugar House, which should be released next year.