Boston Globe Horn Book Awards & Colloquium

This weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the Boston Globe Horn Book Awards Ceremony and the following day-long colloquium at Simmons College. Here were the highlights for me:

Elizabeth Partridge gave a fascinating talk about her book Marching For Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary. She also gave a very cool presentation about Google Lit Trips. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer (it's easy to do), you can download the Marching for Freedom file and take an interactive journey following the exact path the marchers took from Selma to Birmingham. Along the way, Ms. Partridge has embedded a treasure trove of information, music, audio clips from speeches, and photographs to help you delve deeper into the story. There are Google Lit Trips for everything from The Grapes of Wrath to The Kite Runner and Make Way for Ducklings. How cool is that?

Rebecca Stead and her editor, Wendy Lamb, gave a great panel presentation about the collaborative nature of the author-editor relationship. They told a story about their struggles in finding the perfect title for When You Reach Me (the title they originally wanted, "You Are Here," was being used by another book coming out at the same time). And Rebecca Stead did an excellent every-day time travel experiment in her acceptance speech as she read her speech from two different points of view: the Rebecca Stead writing the speech in September, and the point of view of the Rebecca Stead reading the speech in October.

Peter Sis was just as charming, self-deprecating, and intelligent as I imagined he would be. Both his acceptance speech and his contributions to the picture book panel discussion were insightful and inspirational. All of the speeches of the evening will be up online eventually, but if you'd like to get a taste, here is the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award speech Peter Sis gave a couple years ago when he won for his non-fiction book The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Caldecott Honor Book). If you prefer to read along, here is the text. And if you like video, it's a little slow, but you *can* watch it. Peter Sis is about 12 minutes in.

Grab Bag Friday: Horn Book Awards

Tonight is the awards ceremony for the 2010 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for children's literature. The illustrious award  and honor winners will receive their prizes and give their acceptances speeches...and guess what? Because I'll be an attendee at the Horn Book Colloquium at Simmons College this weekend, I get to go!

For me, getting to listen to Rebecca Stead and Peter Sis and Elizabeth Partridge talk, well, that's better than the Oscars. I'll fill you in on all the details next week. In the meantime, here are links to past blog posts I've written about some of the books that will be honored tonight:

Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me (2010 Horn Book Fiction winner)

Elizabeth Partridge, Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary (2010 Horn Book Non-Fiction Winner)

Pam Munoz Ryan, illustrated by Peter Sis, The Dreamer (2010 Honor Book); more on my Peter Sis infatuation here

Newbery Awards!

Last week the ALSC announced the big kidlit awards for 2009. I was so excited to hear that two of my favorite books of the year received Newbery Awards!

Rebecca Stead's mysterious novel When You Reach Me won the Newbery title and Phillip Hoose's enlightening book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice won a Newbery Honor. (If you missed my previous posts raving about the titles, you can find them here and here.)

If you haven't picked these books up yet, I guess now you have another reason. Hooray!

To see the rest of the winners, as well as the winners of the Caldecott, Corretta Scott King, and Printz Awards, please visit the ALSC.

Rebecca Stead: When You Reach Me

All my friends know I'm cheap. I rarely buy books brand-new and almost never buy them in hardcover. But there's been so much buzz in the kidlit world about Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me that I just had to pick it up (okay, so I also had a gift card for Borders).

Was it worth it? You bet.

I read When You Reach Me in one sitting during yesterday's Bears/Seahawks game (victory...hooray for Kevin!) and I became so absorbed that I completely forgot I was in a crowded bar with football fans cheering all around me. Instead, I was in New York City in the 1970's, contemplating mysterious messages and lost friendship and the physics of Madeline L'Engle's masterpiece, A Wrinkle in Time. When the game was over and Kevin was jumping out of his seat in glee, I had to ask breathlessly for just five more minutes to finish the last few pages. (Okay, we'll leave the discussion of how my husband is gracious enough to watch his Sunday games in a sports bar while his wife reads kidlit novels and eats ice cream in plain view of all the other sports fans whose wives are wearing Patriots jerseys and drinking Shipyard...for another day.)

I won't belabor the point. Gripping. Fun. Mysterious. Real. Worth picking up. Even in hardcover.

Here's what the experts have to say:
Fuse #8
The New York Times

Here's an interview with Ms. Stead from Horn Book (where her book recieved that coveted starred review).

Here's the response from Monica Edinger's fourth grade class. Some of my favorite quotes from the student posts:

"When my teacher read this book to us, my mouth dropped open in a perfect O. This will probably happen to anyone who reads this book."

"The beginning may be a little dull but eventually you will be gritting your teeth and and holding on to your pants."

"Well anyway it’s a mysterious book that is good for kid’s that like to have to wait till the end to understand the important things."

Here's an interesting article by Rebecca Stead on how today's tweens have more purchasing power, but less independence than previous generations.