The most exciting part of the ALA Annual Conference was celebrating the Newbery Awards!
On June 25, I got to attend the #Newbery100 Celebration — which, as you might guess, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Newbery Award, the oldest children’s book award in the world! We learned about the history of the award and took a look at all the books that have been honored in this way in over the past one hundred years. And then came a very special Author/Fan Face-Off hosted by Steve Sheinkin and Stacey Rattner and featuring authors facing off against librarians regarding their own books!
That night, I went to an intimate Newbery celebration dinner with my fellow 2022 Newbery authors, Donna Barba Higuera, Andrea Wang, Kyle Lukoff, and Darcie Little Badger, our editors, and our Newbery Committee members. We had a beautiful evening with delicious food, toasts by all the authors, and plenty of happy tears!
Then, on June 26 we got dressed to the nines for the Newbery Awards! First, my family, agent, and I went to a HarperCollins cocktail party. And then came the Newbery Caldecott Dinner and Award Ceremony, a beautiful, star-studded affair in which everyone received their awards. The speeches by Jason Chin (Caldecott Medal winner), Donna Barba Higuera (Newbery Medal winner), and Grace Lin (Children’s Literature Legacy Award winner) were heartfelt and inspiring. And it was mind-blowing to hear my name called and to go up to receive a Newbery Honor for RED, WHITE, AND WHOLE!
When I was a little girl, I always looked for the books with the shiny stickers on them. How stunned am I that now my book — a book of my heart — now has one? It’s almost too wonderful to believe!
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