The winners of the Children’s Choice Book Awards were announced this week, after a whopping 900,000 votes were cast by children across the nation. Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid 6: Cabin Fever, was voted author of the year, and Brian Selznick, illustrator of Wonderstruck, was voted illustrator of the year. Other winners included Three Hens and a Peacock by Lester L. Laminack, illustrated by Henry Cole; Bad Kitty Meets the Baby by Nick Bruel; Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt; and Clockwork Prince: The Infernal Devices, Book Two by Cassandra Clare.
Author and illustrator Gail Gibbons has won the Correll Book Award for Excellence in Early Childhood Informational Text for her 2011 book, Gorillas, which is about (as you may have guessed) Africa’s wild gorillas. Ms. Gibbons has written and illustrated more than 170 nonfiction informational books. Check out Julie Rasicot’s post in edweek.org’s Early Years blog for an interview with Gibbons and more on the award, which the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development recently created.
The 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award winners have been announced. If you’re looking for some recent titles to add to your classroom library, you might find some good candidates among the award winners. The award categories are wide-ranging, but among those of potential interest are juvenile fiction; young adult fiction; multicultural fiction (children’s); children’s picture books (7 & under); children’s picture books (all ages); children’s interactive; multicultural nonfiction (juvenile, teen, and young adult); and nonfiction (juvenile-teen-young adult)
For those of you living in or around New York City, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy (in collaboration with other organizations) has put together a series of exhibitions featuring the works of Robert Delpire, publisher, editor, and curator. The Cultural Services of the French Embassy will host an exhibition of Delpire’s children’s books, which includes the original French edition of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, who passed away this week, and Crocodile Tears by André François. The exhibition opened today and will run through June 6, 2012, on weekday afternoons from 2 p.m to 6 p.m. A panel discussion on Delpire’s children’s books will also take place May 21, 2012