Hoose's ‘Claudette Colvin' Wins National Book Award for Young People's Literature

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By Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 11/18/2009

Author and historian Phillip Hoose’s true story about a brave African-American teen who defied Jim Crow laws in March 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman in Montgomery, AL, is the recipient of the 2009 National Book Award in the category for Young People’s Literature.

For his book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, 2009), Hoose spent four years tracking down the now 70-year-old Colvin, whose courageous act took place just nine months before Rosa Parks’s same stand became a symbol of the Civil Rights movement

“Unreal, I thank everyone in the room and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux,” said Hoose with Colvin at his side as he accepted the award at a Wednesday night black tie ceremony at New York City’s Cipriani restaurant. “I thank this woman beside me whose story was about to disappear. We got to tell an untold story.”

Colvin first came to Hoose’s attention while he was working on his book, We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History (Farrar, 2001). When Colvin, who was 15 at the time, refused to give up her seat, two policemen arrived, dragged the slim and bespectacled teenager backwards by her wrists off the bus, handcuffed her, and threw her in jail. Yet it was Parks' action that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it was Parks whom the U.S. Congress later called the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.”

In an interview with SLJ's Curriculum Connections earlier this year, Hoose says Colvin was very good at remaining, as she called it, "in voluntary exile."

“She lived in the Bronx and had an unlisted phone number. I couldn't find out how to write to her for maybe a

Phillip Hoose Photo: Portland Press-Herald

Colvin, Hoose on award night.

year,” said Hoose, explaining that he finally read an article in which she'd been quoted and asked the reporter to help put them in touch. “I left that message once or twice a year, every year for four years. Finally in the fall of 2006, I came home one night and the answering machine was blinking. I picked it up, it was the reporter, and he said, "Claudette said she'll talk to you. Here's her number. Good luck.”

In another interview with SLJ, Hoose said he was pleased that today’s kids are moved by the story.

“I know they hear the story of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks every Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month, but the immediacy of it, what it would have felt like, how humiliating it was, how unfair it was every day, I think the emotional part of that is fading,” Hoose said. “I’m glad to restore it, to try to help. It’s a part of American history that really needs to be remembered.

Hoose’s riveting and intelligent portrait, which incorporates photographs and other primary source illustrations, as well as Colvin’s own voice, was selected out of 251 books submitted for consideration in the young people’s category. The four other finalists were Deborah Heiligman for Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith (Holt, 2008); Laini Taylor for Lips Touch: Three Times (Scholastic, 2009); Rita Williams-Garcia for Jumped (HarperTeen, 2009); and David Small for Stitches (Norton, 2009). The nomination of Stitches caused a stir among literary circles because it was originally published as an adult title.

Hoose and Colvin at the National Book Award's Teen Press Conference on November 17.

The panel of judges consisted of fellow authors, including Kathi Appelt, Carolyn Coman, Nancy Werlin, Coe Booth and Gene Luen Yang .

The National Book Award is considered the Oscars of American literature with Gore Vidal, Salon magazine's Dave Eggers, satirist Andy Borowitz, and actress Joanne Woodward attending this year’s event.

Read about this year’s National Book Award's Teen Press Conference with the finalists, which took place November 17.