Congratulations to all of the American Library Association award winners! The 2015 Youth Media Awards were announced on Monday, Feb. 2 during ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Chicago. Several of our friends won major awards. A donor to the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Weston Woods Studio, Inc., received the Andrew Carnegie Medal honoring the most outstanding video productions for children released in the previous year. The winners are Paul R. Gagne and Melissa Reilly Ellard, producers of Me…Jane, the adaption of Patrick McDonnell’s Caldecott Honor book for 2012 about Jane Goodall.
University of Connecticut’s Professor Emerita Marilyn Nelson received the Coretta Scott King (Author) Honor Book Award for How I Discovered Poetry, illustrated by Hadley Hooper and published by Dial Books. Donald Crews, who participated in the CT Children’s Book Fair in 1997, is the winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, which honors an author or illustrator who had made “a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.” (ALA.org).
Natalie Lloyd’s first novel, A Snicker of Magic, was a hit at the 2014 CT Children’s Book Fair as was Natalie herself. The audiobook produced by Scholastic Audiobooks was awarded the Odyssey Award, for being one of the best audiobooks produced in English in the U.S. Another Book Fair participant from 2003, Ann M. Martin, was awarded the Schneider Family Book Award for Rain Reign. The Schneider Family honors books embodying “an artistic expression of the disability experience.” (ALA.org).
Mo Willems, another member of the NCLC and Book Fair family, won a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Award for his Waiting is not Easy! published by Hyperion Books for Children. Len Vlahos presented at the Book Fair in 2014 and was a finalist for the 2015 William C. Morris Award, given to a first-time author writing for teens. NCLC donor and Book Fair participant Emily Arnold McCully was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults for her work Ida M. Tarbell: the Woman who Challenged Big Business-and Won!
For a complete listing of the 2015 Youth Media Awards, visit the American Library Association’s site. Congratulations, everyone!