And the Winner Is.... 2014 National Book Award For Young People's Literature

... Jacqueline Woodson, three-time finalist and first time winner) for her free verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), winner of the 2014 National Book Foundation Award for Young People's Literature.  (See my review October 27 review here.)

Woodson was also a 2009 Newbery Honor Medal winner for After Tupac and D Foster.

Other short-listed finalists of books for young adults were Eliot Schrefer, for Threatened (Scholastic Press), Deborah Wiles, for Revolution (The Sixties Trilogy), (Scholastic Press), John Corey Whaley, for Noggin. (Atheneum Press), and Steve Sheinkin, for The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Roaring Brook Press).

National Book Award 2011--Young People's Literature

At the National Book Awards Presentation on November 16, hosted by John Lithgow, the award for Young People's Literature went to Thanhha Lai for Inside Out and Back Again (HarperCollins, 2011). The author begins her story with a strange revelation:

No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.

Being a stranger in a strange land is always hard, but when, as part of the "boat people," Ha and her family flee Saigon at the end of the Viet Nam War, she finds herself an alien in an alien world, seen by the small town families and her classmates as the "enemy." It takes only a few months to move a world away, but much longer to find herself a new person and the strange world around her a home.

Taking the award for adult fiction was Jesmyn Ward for her novel Salvage the Bones. Stephen Greenblatt was the winner of the adult nonfiction prize for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and Nicky Finney was the 2011 poetry award winner for her Head Off & Split.

It's That Time Again: National Book Award Finalists Are Named

The finalists in the prestigious National Book Awards for young people's literature have been announced, accompanied by more than the usual drama produced by an unprecedented comedy of errors.

Franny Billingsley, Chime. (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy. (Marshall Cavendish)

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again. (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books) .

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now. (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) (See my prepublication review here.

The drama occurred when there was an error in reporting one of the titles. Apparently the name of the book Chime by Franny Billingsley was misunderstood, resulting in the pre-announcement notification of Lauren Myracle as a finalist for her highly-reviewed book Shine (Amulet Books, 2011). For three days Myracle, a notable writer of young adult fiction, had to keep what she thought was biggest news of her career a secret until the formal announcement. Shortly after her book was publicly announced as one of five finalists in her division, word spread that Billingsley's book was the intended honoree. Myracle deserves my unofficial Literary Good Sport Award of the Year for her grace in dealing with this disappointment, even declining a short-lived (and then withdrawn) offer to be included in what would then be six finalists! Lauren Myracle proved herself a real winner in this altogether strange course of events.

The 2011 winners in all classes--Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature--will be announced at the gala awards dinner, hosted by John Lithgow, on November 16. I will report the results at that time.