ALA YMA in Review

The award winners have been announced. How did you do? Did your favorites win? Any big surprises? How about history-making choices? 

The Caldecott Medal win for We Are Water Protectors made illustrator Michaela Goade the first BIPOC woman and the first Indigenous illustrator to win the prestigious award. We Are Little Feminists, a board book, won the Stonewall Award for picture books. Christian Soontornvat made history with her double Newbery honors for All Thirteen and A Wish in the Dark. Tae Keller's When You Trap a Tiger won the Newbery Medal and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) Children's Literature award. Women swept the Caldecott and Newbery medals. 

Rounding out the Big Three, Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri won the Printz Award. 

"We felt it was an excellent meeting of middle school with Scheherazade tales where one only wants to get out alive!" Printz committee chair Ellen Spring said in an email. "The personality of Daniel Nayieri shone through with readers learning of his family, early life in Iran and the food, which sounded fantastic! It was an autobiographical novel filled with memory and anecdote. It was a unique refugee story, and there was poop!"

Before noon on the Big Day, TeachingBooks had already created the lists, curating resources for the 75+ titles. (Go to Recent Book Award Winners and Honorees. Filter by Award Year.) 

I missed a few--Me and Mama (Caldecott) and All the Way to the Top (Schneider) were on my shelf, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading them. And I was surprised to see some titles left behind. (Maybe I should do an "It Should Have Been A Newbery/Caldecott/Printz” workshop.) At least there are the Notables, for one more round of recognitions. 

Now what? 

Since last week, I’ve looked at those new lists and created lists that I’ll use in my CSLA sessions at our annual conference. Here are some highlights of my favorite resources. You can use them as booktalk hooks to use with your students. 

Honeybee: Candace Fleming talks about how to make a honeybee something you could care about in her Meet-the-Author Recording. 

The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh: Listen to the Meet-the-Author Recording and discover how a childhood hero inspired Candace Fleming to dig a little deeper and find a flawed man who still became a hero. It’s more than a who-stole-the-baby biography. 

Book Trailers: How We Got to the Moon, A Wish in the Dark, When Stars are Scattered, Dragon Hoops

Book Readings: King and the Dragonflies, Efrén Divided, We Are Not Free

Full Documentary: Everything Sad is Untrue (10 minutes, but you can play about a minute and they’ll be hooked)

And into the Future

Now I’m off to 2021 titles. Publisher-sent boxes are piling up. It’s time to dig in and look ahead. I’ve got a dozen 2021 PDFs on my iPad. Next week, we will look at the newest highly starred titles and start making our shopping lists for spring purchase consideration. Get your wish lists ready to go! 

About the contributor: 

Deborah Ford-Salyer is a long-time lover of children’s and YA lit. Her seminars and workshops have created piles of books to be read on nightstands from the east to west coasts. She’s also the CA Implementation Specialist for TeachingBooks and a senior presenter at BER.org.