Authors and Illustrators Speak Their Minds

True to form, this year's Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet featured a pricey, mediocre meal followed by three terrific speeches.

Writer Richard Peck, whose novel A Year Down Yonder (Dial, 2000) received this year's Newbery Medal, was the first award winner to speak. In a speech replete with pithy one-liners and moments of deft reflection, Peck commended librarians for their efforts to make children's literacy a top priority in schools.

"Thank you for fighting this good fight, school librarians, who know that the beating heart of the school is the library, not the gym," said Peck. "[Thank you] public librarians, who may just be the only adults on call for many of the young. Thank you for stealing time from an increasingly intrusive technology to put the right book in the right young hand. Thank you for standing firm and hanging tough against the book censor who is so often the parent of a nonreading child."

Although Peck was a tough act to follow, illustrator David Small had little trouble holding his own. Small, winner of the Caldecott Medal for So You Want to Be President? (Philomel, 2000), a jaunty look at the American presidency by Judith St. George, strutted to the podium dressed in a top hat and a vintage 1860s suit. "Hit it boys," he ordered as he reached center stage. Immediately, his two sons, Mark and David, began playing a nasal rendition of "Hail to the Chief"—on their kazoos.

Quickly turning serious, Small lamented the condition of our nation's educational system. In particular, he decried the widespread elimination of arts funding in public schools, especially those located in disadvantaged neighborhoods. "Art and music are the things which speak to the human soul," Small insisted. "These necessary tools of human expression have become the exclusive property of a small elite group when they should be readily available to all American schoolchildren."

The evening's most heartfelt moments came when writer Milton Meltzer took the stage. Meltzer, the 87-year-old winner of this year's Wilder Award, spoke about his longtime commitment to writing about social justice. In the early '50s, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, Meltzer, who then worked mostly as a journalist, decided that he would try writing a book, something that he hoped might have some staying power. He eventually decided to write about African-American history, a subject he knew very little about, and a topic that few other writers had tackled. He soon decided he needed a collaborator. That person turned out to be Langston Hughes.

Recalled Meltzer: "For me, one of the most precious moments in my writing life came a few years after the book I created with Langston Hughes appeared. It was early in 1960, just after those four black college students in Greensboro, NC, sat in at a Woolworth lunch counter, challenging its segregation policy. Langston phoned me excitedly to say he'd just heard that when a reporter asked the students why this was happening, one of them replied he had been reading about earlier protest movements in a book called A Pictorial History of the Negro in America [which Meltzer worked on with Hughes]. And [he] decided it was long past time his generation, too, got up and hollered, 'Stop! This oppression must not go on any longer.'"