Award-winning Nonfiction

This time of year is always exciting for children's authors. We get to find out which of our favorite books have won awards. For us nonfiction writers, the biggie is ALA's Robert F. Sibert Award for the most distinguished informational book for children. This year the award went to author Jen Bryant and illustrator Melissa Sweet for The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus (Eerdmans), a beautiful picture book biography.

Being named an honor book is awesome too. This year the five Sibert Honor awards went to:
* Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Penguin/Paulsen)
* Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz & Wade)
*The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker, written by Patricia Hruby Powell, illustrated by Christian Robinson (Chronicle)
* Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands by Katherine Roy (Roaring Brook/Macaulay Studio)
* Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh (Abrams)

The YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults went to Maya Van Wagenen's Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (Dutton)

The four finalists included:
*Laughing at My Nightmare by Shane Burcaw (Roaring Brook)
*The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion & the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz & Wade)
*Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business—and Won! by Emily Arnold McCully (Clarion)
*The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin (Roaring Brook).

One of the Stonewall Honor Books for exceptional merit relating to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience was also a nonfiction title: Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin (Candlewick)

And the elevation of the art and design of nonfiction was evident in the inclusion of several NF titles named Caldecott honor books:
*The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art, illustrated by Mary GrandPré, written by Barb Rosenstock (Knopf)
*Viva Frida, written and illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Roaring Brook/Porter)

*The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, written by Jen Bryant (Eerdmans)

CONGRATULATIONS to all the winners! If you haven't read them yet, interloan them now. Use them as mentor texts for your own projects, and maybe someday your name will be forever connected to that of Sibert, or Caldecott, or Newbery.