Winners and honor books have been announced by We Need Diverse Books for the Walter Dean Myers Awards for Outstanding Children's Literature (the "Walters"). A ceremony will be held March 16 at the Library of Congress, with National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jacqueline Woodson as the emcee and guest speaker. This year's Walter Award honorees are:
Teen winner: Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
Honor books: You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins; and Disappeared by Francisco X. Stork
Younger Readers winner: Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Eric Velasquez
Honor book: Forest World by Margarita Engle
The Walter Awards Ceremony will be preceded by "Seen and Heard: The Power of Books," a symposium on diversity in children's literature, co-hosted by the Library of Congress and moderated by Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park. WNDB will donate a minimum of 2,000 copies of each of the 2018 Walter Award-winning titles to schools with limited budgets across the United States.
"Significant changes in the publishing industry have been especially visible with the Walters," said Ellen Oh, founding director of WNDB. "The eligible titles submitted over the last three years since the awards' inception have increased dramatically, from 50 titles in 2016, to almost 80 in 2017, to nearly 200 books that were considered for the 2018 Walters. The positive impact of the Walters feels like a fitting legacy to the late, great Walter Dean Myers."
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Amy Goldstein won the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award for Janesville: An American Story (S&S). The winner was announced at the company's annual industry gathering in New York City, where author Tom Peters was also given the fourth annual Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry.
"Goldstein's book presents an urgent, searing tale of the domino-decline of a proud and industrious community," said CEO Rebecca Schwartz. "Through Janesville we see the very human toll of what we as a country too often characterize as 'just business.' "
General manager Sally Haldorson added that Goldstein's book "tells a story about the majority of working people, people who most business books don't even nod at, and then only as people to manage: those who work on the shop floor or in the shopping mall, whose livelihoods became irrevocably compromised, whose 'side hustle' isn't a side hustle but the only way to buy groceries."