Posts on awards

Last night, the Lambda Literary Awards were announced. The winner for the children's/YA category is Out of the Pocket, by Bill Konigsberg (Dutton, 2008).

Out of the Pocket is a pretty straight-ahead (so to speak) coming out story but effectively in tune with the times. At the beginning of the novel, high school football star Bobby knows he's gay but is terrified that coming out would mean the end of his sports career. (How many out American athletes—much less football players—can you name?) Bobby's tired of keeping his secret, though, and begins the process of coming out to a few confidantes. But when his trust is betrayed, Bobby is suddenly a sensation in sports media, but not for the reasons he would have hoped.

What makes Out of the Pocket a coming out story for the latter Aughts is the focus on the process of coming out to other people, as opposed to self. Moreover, while reactions to Bobby's revelation are varied, Bobby ultimately finds more acceptance (some of it realistically grudging, as from his coach) than adversity. Over all, it's an engaging and optimistic story carrying the message that yes, you can come out and not get tarred and feathered, get killed in a car crash, or commit suicide.

I haven't read all the finalists, but any of those I have would have been solid choices. So, congratulations to Bill Konigsberg and, once again, to all the other shortlisted authors!

Speaking of optimistic coming out stories, I was recently commiserating with my blogger pal Rie (Girls. Books. Food. Art. Love) about how much the climate for queer teens has changed in just the past 10 to 15 years. Rie brought up the trend in early queer teen literature for gay and lesbian characters to meet tragic ends. Meanwhile, I was having trouble remembering how many queer teen books I even had access to; I could only think of a handful. Had there really been so few?

Thank goodness I kept a book log in high school—and kept it filed away all these years. (I still have all those excruciating journals from those years, too. What of it?) When I began my coming out process in 1993, I tried to get my hand on just about every queer book I could: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays. I did subject searches in the public and high school library catalogs. I combed the shelves of my local bookstore. In other words, I was looking so hard that if I didn't find it, I'm pretty sure it didn't exist.

So, what was there? Well, aside from a bunch of adult literature (gay novels by Edmund White, Christopher Bram, and Armistead Maupin; lesbian novels by Rita Mae Brown and Jeanette Winterson—whose Art and Lies I found so incomprehensible I never recovered from it to read others; nonfiction by Randy Shilts; plays by Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally, and Tony Kushner), not much. Here's what I discovered on my book log, for queer teen books published prior to 1993:

• Sticks and Stones, by Lynn Hall (in which a gay character DIES)
• The Man Without a Face, by Isabelle Holland (in which a gay character DIES)
• Trying Hard to Hear You, by Sandra Scoppettone (in which a gay character DIES... and another gets TARRED AND FEATHERED)
• Happy Endings Are All Alike, by Sandra Scoppettone (in which a gay character is RAPED)
• Annie on My MInd, by Nancy Garden (in which, unlike the above, there actually IS a happy ending, OMG.)

It's worth mentioning that I didn't encounter Annie on My Mind until late 1995, when I started going to a local queer youth group (this was pre-GSA in my hometown). They kept a Styrofoam cooler full of resources: The Rainbow Gayme, Ivan Velez's Tales of the Closet comic book series, some coming out guides, and a handful of novels with actual happy endings. (Happily, by the time I dropped in for a visit during the summer of 1997, they'd outgrown the cooler.)

In 1994 and 1995, another handful of queer teen books became available—though due to limited availability at the public library (and jack at my school library), I didn't get my hands on most of these until two years after I'd begun to question myself—two years after I needed them so badly. Here's the rest of what I got before I went to college:

• The Cat Came Back, by Hillary Mullins
• Not the Only One, edited by Tony Grima
• Dive, by Stacey Donovan
• Deliver Us from Evie, by M. E. Kerr
• Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence, edited by Marion Dane Bauer (which I read piece-meal at the book store, sneaking a few pages here and there when I thought no one was looking)

If there were others, I couldn't find them. I've looked at the Lambda Literary Foundation children's/YA award lists from those years. There were indeed queer books for kids and teens being published. But most of them I've never heard of. They came from small publishers. They may never have gotten reviewed by reputable library journals. They probably weren't making it into libraries and mainstream bookstores. And if they were, maybe the subject headings were so cruddy they were still impossible to find.

I know I had way more literature available to me than teens coming out five, ten, twenty, or more years before me. But it wasn't enough of the right stuff at the right time. I'm so very glad the teens coming out five, ten, fifteen years after me have so much more available to them, much of it available in their local and school libraries, despite ongoing censorship challenges.

And yet, I still think we need more. More books published. More variety of characters and experiences represented. More books making it onto library shelves, especially school library shelves. More and better access through cataloging and bibliographies. It's crucial to providing more information, more support, and more acceptance for queer teens today and in the future.

This year's Lambda Literary Award finalists have been announced! According to the Foundation website, "The Lambda Literary Awards seek to recognize excellence in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender literature."

Previous winners in the children's/YA category have included some of my favorite GLBTQ books such as So Hard to Say, by Alex Sanchez, Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan, and Good Moon Rising, by Nancy Garden. And I have many more favorites among the annual finalists.

This year's finalists are especially exciting to me because my friend Pat Schmatz's novel Mousetraps, which deals beautifully with homophobic bullying, is among them! This is a huge honor and I'm thrilled for both Pat and Mousetraps. If you'd like to know more about the book, check out our interview last fall.

Also among the finalists is Love and Lies: Marisol's Story, by Ellen Wittlinger. This is another book I loved, and it's also the companion to Hard Love, which won the Lambda in 1999.

Huge congratulations to Pat, Ellen, and the other authors of this year's shortlisted books!

(Via Malinda Lo)

I'm late to the party, but I still wanted to post a link to the 2008-9 Cybil Award winners. The Cybils are the Children and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards, and I believe this batch marks their third season. In a labor of love, the Cybils panelists and judges read dozens upon dozens of nominated titles, trying to strike a balance between books' literary quality and accessibility/popularity.

I loved and reviewed both the middle-grade fiction winner, The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd, and the young adult fiction winnder, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart. But all the other winners I've read were also top-notch. Definitely take a look!

AL Focus has posted a video of the calls to winners of the 2009 Youth Media Awards, from the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Denver. Hear Terry Pratchett hoot and Laurie Halse Anderson sound like Tessie from Annie ("oh my goodness, oh my goodness"). It's all pretty darn cute.

My hurried and scattered initial thoughts on the ALA Children's Media Awards...

- Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults - Laurie Halse Anderson for Catalyst, Fever 1793, and Speak. No real surprise there.

- Morris Award for new author goes to Elizabeth C. Bunce for A Curse Dark as Gold. I enjoyed all the books I'd read from the shortlist, including this one, so no complaints.

- Printz Award goes to Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta. Haven't read it. Honors go to Tender Morsels (haven't read), The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (loved), Nation (didn't finish, but probably will someday), and Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II (will read after I reread Octavian I). No surprises in this list.

(ETA: There were quite a few books that could easily have shown up on this list and would not have surprised me, e.g. Paper Towns and Madapple. It was a great year for YA lit.)

- Pura Belpré for Latino/a authors and illustrators - Hey, apparently it's now an annual award instead of biannual? That's great; it must be in response to more available material. Meanwhile, both Yuyi Morales and Margarita Engle take top honors for illustration and narration, respectively, for the second year in a row!

- "May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture recognizing an individual who shall prepare a paper considered to be a significant contribution to the field of children's literature" goes to Kathleen T. Horning of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC). Yay, KT! But I want to know what the paper's about.

- Robert F. Sibert Medal for most distinguished informational book for children goes to Kadir Nelson for We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. Again, not a surprise. Scanning back in the Twitter feed, it looks like We Are the Ship also got a King Honor for illustration and the King Award for narration. (The King Award for illustration went to The Blacker the Berry, which I don't think I've seen yet.)

- Geisel Award for early reader - Are You Ready to Play Outside?, by Mo Willems. DEFINITELY not a surprise that Willems picked this up. The Elephant and Piggie books are one of those rare and precious early reader series: deceptively simple stories, illustration, and dialogue, yet so much personality and humor that people of all ages love them. WHY do people still ask for the Dick and Jane books???

- Caldecott Award - No real surprises. Honors went to: A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever, by Marla Frazee; How I Learned Geography, by Uri Shulevitz; River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, written by Jen Bryant. Winner: The House in the Night, illustrated by Beth Krommes, written by Susan Marie Swanson. No real surprises.

(ETA: What is a surprise: no recognition for Wabi Sabi, by Ed Young.)

- Newbery Award - Honors went to: The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt; The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom, by Margarita Engle; Savvy, by Ingrid Law; After Tupac and D Foster, by Jacqueline Woodson.

The Surrender Tree getting an Honor should once again dispute the conspiracy theorists who think "ethnic" books are pigeon-holed into receiving only ethnic awards. The Woodson's a small surprise, but mainly because After Tupac didn't get nearly the love that Feathers did last year. No surprise on the others.

(ETA: Actually, I guess the biggest surprise is that Chains: Seeds of America, by Laurie Halse Anderson, didn't pick up an Honor. I haven't read it myself, but with The Underneath (which I tried to make myself read and just couldn't follow through on; slow lyrical language and abused animal are just not my thing), it's got to be the most talked-about middle grade novel of 2008.)

Winner: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman. Again, no surprise. There was a lot of murmuring about this book over the weekend, and I'm a 75% Neil Gaiman fan anyway, so I reserved it just in case. Glad I did! Though probably I should just buy it. I can't wait to read it. Also, it looks to be a lot kid-friendlier than last year's winner, which should help with all the recent Newbery nay-saying.

(ETA: Amusing: Neil Gaiman's reaction to "the call." Via Library Voice.)

In three short weeks, the children's book world will be abuzz with reactions to the Association for Library Service to Children's media awards, especially the Newbery and Caldecott. Diane Foote, Executive Director of ALSC, took time to answer some of my questions for The Prairie Wind, SCBWI Illinois' quarterly newsletter, with special focus on ALSC's awards and notable children's book lists. You can read the interview here!

The UK Guardian's Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been announced! This year's winner is a book called Shire Hell, by Rachel Johnson. John Updike was also awarded a lifetime achievement award.

You can read (and possibly cringe over) excerpts from some of the short-listed books online. I'd share some here, but, well, this is a family blog.

For those immersed in the so-called Kidlitosphere, there weren't too many surprises at ALA's Youth Media Awards on Monday. For instance, Fuse #8 nailed the Newberys in her Predict-o-Rama.

The stunner, of course, was The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, winning the Caldecott Medal. Not because no one liked it, but because folks feared its story depended too much on illustrations to win the Newbery, too much on text to win the Caldecott. (In fact, Wizards Wireless explained the conundrum in great detail.)

But the Caldecott committee has a history of rewarding innovation as well as history in picture books (that's why certain people look at certain winners and think, "Um, what?"), so in that way their choice wasn't surprising at all. NPR's All Things Considered report on the awards quotes the head of the 2008 committee, who said it was all about deciding that Hugo Cabret, with its chunks of full-bleed, plot-advancing, cinematic spreads did indeed qualify as a picture book.

If you listen to the report, you can also hear exactly as much of the Caldecott announcement as I did. (ALA's live webcast of the awards is very cool, but still has a few wrinkles in my experience...)

I was pleased also that Laura Vaccaro Seeger's First the Egg received a Caldecott Honor as well as a Geisel Honor. Seeger has created several astounding concept books. With simple shapes and colors, and clever die-cuts, her books are deceptively simple and a delight to devour.

The Washington Post did a nice wrap-up of the awards, but the best part is definitely the delightfully hilarious photo of Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz wearing a tiara and gasping, we hope for joy.

It’s that time of year, when children’s literature aficionados all over America beginning panting in anticipation of the Association for Library Service to Children’s announcement of its awards for children's literature, most famously the Newbery and Caldecott Awards – so that we can spend the rest of the year crowing or complaining about the results.

As a writer and academic (for lack of a better term) reader, I love the Newbery and Caldecott awards. As a public librarian and pleasure reader, I loathe them. Why the contradiction?

The Love

For credibility’s sake, every industry needs to recognize its gold standard. In a society whose popular conception of children’s literature is limited (it sometimes seems) to media tie-ins, books turned into blockbuster movies, and treasured classics, the Newbery and Caldecott remind not just children’s literature professionals but the reading public at large that there is better/more available.

Likewise, when the National Review announced its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century, there was outcry about the list's bias toward books published before 1950, as if nothing good has been written in the last half of the century. Big-name awards like the Newbery and Caldecott remind us that marvelous new literature is being published every year.

The Hate

There’s plenty of criticism of the Newbery and Caldecott in terms of the award criteria and judging. There are complaints about bias toward realistic fiction, serious fiction, historical fiction, fiction about girls, fiction about European-Americans, fiction in general. There are complaints about the awards going to books without obvious child appeal. There are complaints about the criteria, which limit winners to American authors and seem to eliminate books dependent on the marriage of text and illustration.

These criticisms are not baseless, but the method of judging is not the main source of my irritation. After all, there are tons of other children’s book awards (e.g., Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, National Book Awards, regional kids' choice awards), albeit not as well-known and awe-inducing. No, what bugs me is how the public too often responds to those shiny gold and silver stickers on the winners’ covers.

I hate the perception, held by far too many, that Newbery and Caldecott winners are the best books, period. They are excellent books. They are some of the very best. Some are gems that will be loved 75 or more years down the line. But “best”, the superlative “best”, is a matter of human opinion. The gold medal can only be given to one book per year, and it's a difficult decision made by a different committee every year. It is not the decree of some great, all-knowing literary god.

To infer that these select few books are the only books worth reading from a given year is a tragic mistake. And a ridiculous one, I would think. But then why do I have adults coming to the library telling me they want their children to read Newbery and Caldecott winners above and before all others “because they are the best ones”? Because I have.

I’m also bothered by school assignments that send children to the library specifically for Newbery and Caldecott winners. Of course I want children to appreciate great literature along with whatever else they read. But teaching children that these winners are “the best” is a double-edged sword. Maybe they’ll gain appreciation for the craft of writing and illustration. Or maybe, when they struggle through one of the more difficult winners, they’ll wonder why they hate the “best” books so much. Maybe, they wonder, it’s because they’re bad readers. Maybe it's because they don't understand what makes a good book. Or maybe it's because adults just don't get it.

There are plenty of books on those award lists I don’t care for. I understand that it’s not because I am a bad reader or because the books shouldn’t have received the award, but because I just don’t like them. I know that as with any other book, “best” or not, it comes down to my personal taste. But I worry about children generalizing about those gold and silver stickers. Sometimes when I booktalk The House of the Scorpion or Princess Academy or Holes, I tell the child: “Don’t worry about these stickers on the cover. This book was so exciting/funny/fascinating, it kept me up half the night.”

The school assignment that has driven me craziest this season is a Caldecott-related assignment for a local school’s second grade reading classes. Students were to choose a Caldecott book to read. The problems as I see them:

1. Since the Caldecott Medal is for illustration, not every Caldecott-winning book has words! (Case in point: 2007’s winner Flotsam, by David Wiesner.)
2. Even though every Caldecott winner is a picture book, not every one is appropriate for a second grader to read independently. Parents saw Kitten’s First Full Moon and told their children they must pick something harder, until I hopped up and down and begged them to understand the nature of the Caldecott. Meanwhile, St. George and the Dragon is too difficult for many second graders to read on their own.
3. “Because the Caldecott Medal is for illustration, students will design a new cover for their chosen book” (I quote the assignment to the best of my recollection). After all, what better way to appreciate great illustration than to – not imitate it – but redo it entirely.

If we’re teaching kids to appreciate Caldecott-winning books, shouldn’t we follow the award committee’s example and focus primarily on the art? At best, it leaves me scratching my head. At worst, I want to knock heads together.

That’s enough complaining. All I can do as a librarian is help my patrons understand that the Newbery and Caldecott Medals are not the be-all and end-all. All I can do is help them understand what the awards mean, and what they do not.

Moving On to Predictions...

I’m rarely able to predict Newbery and Caldecott winners, in part because I don’t read new books exhaustively enough. For example, while I predicted Flotsam as last year’s Caldecott winner, I hadn’t read any of the Newbery Medal winner/honors at the time of the awards.

The only book I have a strong feeling about this year is Elijah of Buxton. Once again, Christopher Paul Curtis has beautifully written a story of equal parts humor and deadly seriousness, a work of historical fiction I think has real child (not to mention, adult) appeal. I fully expect it will have one of those gold or silver stickers gracing its cover come Monday morning. Fuse #8 has a nice review of it here.

Wizard’s Wireless is hosting this month’s Carnival of Children’s Literature on the topic of children’s book awards. You can submit your link at BlogCarnival.com. The deadline to submit an entry is January 18, with the round-up to be posted January 21.