The 2018 American Library Association Youth Media Awards were announced this morning!  For those of you who weren’t waiting on tenterhooks and watching the announcements live streaming or monitoring your twitter feed, here’s a complete list. 

I always like to see what books and audiobooks are getting recognition, to find out how many I have read and appreciated (or not appreciated) myself.  I always put holds on a lot of books after these announcements to see what I’ve been missing.  If you are responsible for collection development, I hope you are taking a look!

What did you think?  Any books you were especially excited about?  Any you wish would have gotten more attention?  Any you didn’t love that were recognized? 

Every year I hear about Mock Newbery or Caldecott or Printz projects.  I think it would be fun to do one around here for a couple of reasons.  One, it would provide an opportunity to critically examine literature for young people and test our own opinions about them in the crucible of rigorous discussion.  Two, it would give us ideas about how to do this with kids!  Last year, I heard the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s K.T. Horning talking about kids who had been through a Mock Newbery process of their own who then got to watch the live-stream of the announcements.  Kids you wouldn’t normally expect to have so much enthusiasm for books were truly invested in finding out if their favorites would be winners, and felt like their opinions were important.  Sounds pretty cool!

No promises, but if you are interested in doing something like this, I’d love to hear about it.  Or if you are doing it already in your community, tell me about that, too!