ALA Conference 2009: Ashley Bryan Steals the Show
By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 7/12/2009
For one giddy, improbable evening, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award upstaged its far more glamorous siblings, the Newbery and Caldecott Awards, during the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference in Chicago Sunday night. That's because this year’s Wilder recipient, author-illustrator Ashley Bryan, just hours shy of his 86th birthday, completely stole the show.
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Ashley Bryan, winner of the 2009 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. |
Bryan, the 2009 winner of the Association for Library Service to Children’s Wilder Award, which honors an author or illustrator whose books have made a substantial and lasting contribution to children’s literature, spoke of his childhood, growing up as one of six children in the Bronx, NY.
When Bryan first applied for an art scholarship in the 1940s, he was told that "it was a waste to give a scholarship to a colored person,” he remembers. In the 1960s, when Bryan was in his 40s, he was discovered by Jean Karl, the founder of Atheneum Books, who encouraged him to create children's books. Bryan eventually went on to win the 1990 Arbuthnot Award, the 1993 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen United States Nomination for illustration, the Silver Medallion for Contributions to Children’s Literature, the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, and the 2004 Coretta Scott King Award for Beautiful Blackbird (2003). His award-winning Walk Together Children (1974, both Atheneum) was an ALA Notable Book in 1974.
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| Neil Gaiman, winner of the 2009 Newbery Medal |
Neil Gaiman, winner of the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2008), cracked up the roomful of librarians and publishers when he spoke of growing up in England as “a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians.” As a child, Gaiman says, he devoured books, "the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and those I merely liked.”
Gaiman was inspired to write The Graveyard Book—about a toddler who’s adopted by the residents of an old graveyard after his parents are murdered—in 1985, after seeing his then two-year-old son Mike pedaling his tricycle around a graveyard. But it was decades later before Gaiman thought he was a good enough writer to tell the story in a book. Winning the Newbery Medal, says Gaiman, "made me cool to my children, which is almost as good as it gets."
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Beth Krommes, winner of the 2009 Caldecott Medal for The House in the Night. |
Working with her longtime editor Ann Rider, Krommes used a scratchboard technique to create the spare black-and-white drawings in the simple picture book about a girl who reads a book about a bird and images that it is flying through the night with her on its back.
With a lump in her throat, the illustrator said she “wouldn't be here today if it weren't for my children. Having kids made me realize the spectacular art in children's books.”
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