Essex Books Presents 'Shelf Awareness': Gold Stickers - The 2017 Newbery and Caldecott Winners

By: Jan. 27, 2017
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Essex Books Presents Shelf Awareness: Friday, January 27, 2017 - Gold Stickers: The 2017 Newbery and Caldecott Winners

On the Monday after the presidential inauguration, the March for Social Justice and Women, and several major sports events, the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards were announced at ALA's Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta, Ga. Right up there, decibel-wise, with the shouts of marchers and sports fans were the enthusiastic hurrahs of librarians and publishers rooting for their favorite children's and teen books, with 19 different types of awards celebrated that day. Find the complete list of Youth Media Awards here.

The best-known ALA prize, the Newbery Medal, was awarded to Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin Books for Young Readers). In our interview with the thrilled Newbery winner, she said her thought-provoking fantasy was about "a 500-year-old witch and a poetry-quoting swamp monster and a perfectly tiny dragon with delusions of grandeur who all have to raise a magical baby." Thom Barthelmess, chair of the 2017 Newbery Medal selection committee, notes that this is the first "high fantasy" to win the Newbery Medal since 1985, when Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown was selected.

Javaka Steptoe won the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Radiant Child (Little, Brown), a picture-book biography of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) who covered New York City with his electrifying graffiti. The book begins, "Somewhere in Brooklyn, between hearts/ that thump, double Dutch, and hopscotch/ and salty mouths that slurp sweet ice,/ a little boy dreams of being a famous ARTIST." Steptoe's gorgeous, Basquiat-inspired, collage-style paintings literally incorporate "bits of New York City"--they're painted on the wood scraps he found in discarded Brooklyn Museum exhibit materials and in brownstone dumpsters.

In Essex Books' interview with Steptoe, he says, "It was something that I really put my heart into and I appreciate the love I'm getting back in return." --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness



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