2008 Newbery Honors Creative Librarian

This year’s Newbery Award-winning book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick), began life a decade ago as a classroom project at the Park School of Baltimore, where librarian-turned-author Laura Amy Schlitz has been working since the early 1990s.

The Newbery Medal was founded in 1922 and is awarded for “best children’s book in the United States.” Previous Newbery winners include Louis Sachar’s Holes (1999), Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1978), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963), King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (1949) and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting (1923).

A complete list of Newbery-winning books is here.

Three Newbery honor books are chosen each year. In 2008 they are Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic), The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) and Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (Putnam).

At the same time, the Randolph Caldecott award for top picture book went to Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Orson Scott Card won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults while Mo Willems was awarded the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished book for beginning readers for her There Is a Bird in Your Head!

The awards honor books for children published in the United States and were announced by the American Library Association, currently meeting in Philadelphia.