Annual Carle Honors announced

Each year, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art "pays tribute to those individuals who are dedicated to the art of the picture book and its integral role in art appreciation and early literacy" with their Carle Honors.  The 2011 honorees are

Artist: Lois Ehlert

Angel: Jeanne Steig

Mentor: Michael di Capua 

Bridge: Karen Nelson Hoyle

Learn more about the honorees and the categories here. 

An Honors Gala—including the ceremony, a dinner reception, and a silent auction of author experiences and original art to benefit the museum—will be held September 22 at Guastavino's in New York. The auction items are unbelievable; go ogle them either online or in person at NYC's Books of Wonder. A sampling:
- illustrations by Tomi Ungerer, Chris van Allsburg, honoree Lois Ehlert, and more
- visits with Tomie DePaola and Kadir Nelson
- personalized poems by Jane Yolen
- customized art by Rosemary Wells and Eric Carle himself

Newbery books will win new readers

The four titles in Houghton/Sandpiper's welcome Newbery Collection boxed set (September) seem to belong together: Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard, and Elizabeth Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

The publisher may have grouped these winners together simply because they’re all historical fiction. But their affinities go beyond that: they each contain sustained adventure or intrigue, moments of heroism, and an unusual depth of feeling, all channeled through a singularly relatable, empathetic main character. Can’t you just picture the avid readers, the introspective ten- and eleven-year-old girls eager to experience the wider world, who will gobble these books up? This collection may have been produced to spur sales, but it should also win hearts.

—Martha Parravano

Save the date—BGHB Awards and Horn Book at Simmons

The office is starting to buzz about the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards taking place Friday, September 30, and the Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium, happening Saturday, October 1. On Friday night, BGHB judges Jennifer Brabander, Robin Brenner, and Dean Schneider will present the awards to this year's winners and honorees:

Fiction
Winner: Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones
Honor book: Chime by Franny Billingsley
Honor book: Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke, illustrated by Lauren Tobia

Nonfiction
Winner: The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism, & Treachery by Steve Sheinkin
Honor book: Into the Unknown: How Great Explorers Found Their Way by Land, Sea, and Air by Stewart Ross, illustrated by Stephen Biesty
Honor book: Can We Save the Tiger? by Martin Jenkins, illustrated by Vicky White

Picture book
Winner: Pocketful of Posies by Salley Mavor
Honor book: Pecan Pie Baby by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Sophie Blackall
Honor book: Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Rick Allen

The ceremony will be followed by a reception with the winners. Mosey over to our website to see video and pictures of last year's (and previous years') awards festivities.

Join us the next day for the Horn Book at Simmons colloquium, led by Horn Book editor in chief Roger Sutton and Cathie Mercier, director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Children's Literature. Entitled "Engaging Worlds, Real and Imagined," the colloquium will feature all three of this year's winners (and many more speakers) in presentations, panels, and workshops. Registration for the colloquium includes an invite to Friday's awards ceremony. Sign up here!

ALA Live Five round-up

Tomie dePaola and Roger

Over at Read Roger, our indefatigable leader has been posting highlights from his nine Live Five interviews with the 2011 Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Wilder, Sibert, and Printz luminaries, plus bonus interviews with superstars Brian Selznick and Rick Riordan. Head over and learn whose dog Roger wants and what he and Rita Williams-Garcia were singing about.

July/August 2011 special issue: Awards

The July/August Horn Book Magazine is out, and selected articles are on our website, including profiles of the Newbery, Caldecott, and Wilder medalists and the CSK author and illustrator award recipients. And don't miss K.T. Horning's eye-opening "Secrecy and the Newbery Medal"...in which much history is related and several secrets revealed.

What do the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation and the Horn Book have in common?

We both gave Laurel Croza and I Know Here an award.

In response to winning the Boston Globe–Horn Book Picture Book Award, Laurel said,

That’s me, flash-frozen in disbelief—“whaaaaat!?!”—since I heard I Know Here won a 2010 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Way, way, way beyond my daydreaming orbit, the news too surreal, too out-of-this-world abstract to hold in my mind for longer than a few seconds." (Read more...)

Congratulations on winning the 2011 Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, Laurel! We hope this time the news feels a little more real.

Laurel and I Know Here illustrator Matt James at the 2010 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards reception

(And congrats to Tao Nyeu and Bunny Days for the New Illustrator Award win!)

J. Patrick Lewis named new Children's Poet Laureate

Today J. Patrick Lewis was named the national Children's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. He's the third to hold the two-year post, following Jack Prelutsky and Mary Ann Hoberman.

In his article "On Originality in Children's Poetry" in the May 2005 Magazine, Lewis referenced T.S. Eliot's observation that "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Lewis went on to say,

If you read contemporary children’s poetry with some knowledge of the grand tradition from which it flows, only tone deafness can keep you from hearing echoes of the past: the lambent lines of worthies like Christina Rossetti, Langston Hughes, and Robert Louis Stevenson in gentle poems, or the inspired wordplay of David McCord and John Ciardi in nonsense verse. . . .

My own benefactors range from Eliot himself, Auden, Housman, Lear, Carroll, the Carryls—Charles and Guy, père and fils—to many other lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century toilers in poetry, nonsense, and light verse. I happily confess my felonies. When poets stand on the shoulders of their forebears, they should do so with a lightness, not to say airiness, that bespeaks respect for the tradition and an unimpeachable commitment to originality.

Clearly, the man knows what he's talking about: his knowledge of poetic tradition informs the originality of his own work. Congratulations to Mr. Lewis.

Post-mortem

After some fierce competition—including a first-round heartbreaker storming back from the dead!—Jonathan Stroud’s The Ring of Solomon won School Library Journal’s Battle of the Kids’ Books. To get the inside scoop, we caught up with Battle Commentator Jonathan Hunt.

First things first: Did the best man win?
I certainly think you can make a case that it did; I'm a huge Bartimaeus fan, and I thought this one was just as good as the previous ones. I probably would have opted for A Conspiracy of Kings, personally, and I'm on record as being a big fan of Keeper, too. So it's hard for me to be objective.

Which book did you vote for in the undead round?
I voted for A Conspiracy of Kings. I was tempted by Sugar Changed the World, but didn't think it would be a serious contender to come back from the dead.

Whose true colors came out over the course of the contest? What were those colors?
Everybody showed just how nice they are—almost too nice. I wouldn't mind seeing some old-fashioned cattiness.

Did you have any knock-down, drag-outs with Battle Commanders Roxanne and Monica? If so, over what? (Extra points if it’s not a book.)
We don't fight about specific books as much as we fight about issues of balance. Do we have too many books in one genre? Do we skew very old or very young? Do we have enough under-recognized genres such as poetry, nonfiction, or graphic novels? Do we have too many books from one publisher?

What can you spill about next year’s contenders? Judges?
We typically don't start discussing possibilities until the fall, but I can't imagine that we won't be seriously talking about such spring titles as Chime by Franny Billingsley, Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt, and Amelia Lost by Candace Fleming. SLJ recruits and assigns judges. I keep waiting for them to run out of big, impressive names—but it hasn't happened yet.

Don’t think, just answer: The Ring of Solomon vs. Marching for Freedom [last year’s winner]. Oh, and why? (Now you can think.)
The Ring of Solomon... because my twelve-year old self is a bully!

—Elissa Gershowitz

New newsletter and next issue's stars

The ALA awards edition of Notes from the Horn Book arrives this afternoon -- if you're not subscribed, visit our website to view it online and sign up.


If that's not quite enough to tide you over until the next issue, here are the books receiving starred reviews in the March/April Magazine:

Where’s Walrus? by Stephen Savage (Scholastic)
Chime by Franny Billingsley (Dial)
Recovery Road by Blake Nelson (Scholastic)
The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone (Levine/Scholastic)
Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt; illus. by Louise Yates (Knopf)
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming (Schwartz & Wade/Random)
Me…Jane by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown)
Meadowlands: A Wetlands Survival Story by Thomas F. Yezerski (Farrar)

Ruminations on Room

A while back Little, Brown sent us a copy of Emma Donoghue's grown-up novel Room, with a note saying they're hoping to increase the novel's readership. An international bestseller since its publication in August, Room's readers are already millions strong -- what LB is looking for with a Horn Book review is not a larger audience so much as a younger one.

Room is narrated by five-year-old Jack, whose perspective naturally lingers on five-year-old concerns, e.g. what happens to poo when you flush the toilet, where Dora the Explorer goes when she's not in TV, and how soon he can open his birthday presents. What quickly becomes apparent is how Jack's perspective differs from his mother's. He sees Room: a world containing cozy Bed and Rug, toys he and Ma have made themselves, a mysterious visitor who sometimes arrives in the night while Jack hides in Wardrobe (but who, more importantly, delivers the much-anticipated weekly Sundaytreat).

Ma sees the eleven-foot square garden shed where a kidnapper/rapist has held her captive for seven years.

While things do change radically partway through the novel, Jack and Ma's lives are still far from hunky-dory -- and yet this is ultimately a heartbreakingly hopeful novel about love and the resilience of childhood.

Room received an Alex award on Monday, marking it as a book "written for adults that [has] special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18." Despite LB's note, the award, and my own enjoyment of the novel, I have my reservations about encouraging teens to read it. Readers at the younger end of the Alex age range may not be able to read between the lines of Jack's narrative, in which case the story loses much of its power. Those who do see through Jack's perspective to Ma's may be disturbed by what's really happening: kidnapping, rape, imprisonment, physical and emotional abuse, crippling depression, media exploitation. The reader's task of bridging the disconnect between Jack's reality and Ma's is itself emotionally difficult. It forces the reader to give up a sort of innocence in gaining the understanding that Jack's world is different, darker, than it appears through his eyes.

Then again, Room is not a book for every adult reader, either; perhaps teens who can stomach the brutality of Tender Morsels or Beloved for the beauty in those novels will be drawn to Room as well.

What do you think -- have you read Room? What age readers would you recommend it to?

-- Katie Bircher

A proud day for Amos McGee

Over at The Horn Book website, you'll find yesterday's ALA award winners, plus our reviews of winning titles. Congratulations to all the winners!

Also, January's Notes from the Horn Book (including five questions for Jeannie Baker, armchair-traveling novels for middle graders, "Read it again!"-worthy toddler books, nonfiction picture books, and "out-of-this-world" YA) is in your inbox now -- unless you're not a subscriber, in which sad case you can view it online here and sign up here.