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| Winners and Honorees (l.-r.) Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, Hannah V. Sawyerr, Ari Tison, Jacqueline Woodson, and Elizabeth Acevedo | |
We Need Diverse Books hosted the ninth annual Walter Dean Myers Awards celebration on Wednesday morning, March 13, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Central Library in Washington, D.C. Both of the 2024 winners--Younger Readers winner Jacqueline Woodson (Remember Us, Nancy Paulsen Books) and Teen Readers winner Ari Tison (Saints of the Household, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)--were in attendance, as were two of the five honorees: Teen Reader honoree Hannah V. Sawyerr (All the Fighting Parts, Amulet/Abrams) and Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, one of the four co-authors for the Younger Readers honoree Grounded (Amulet/Abrams).
The Walter Dean Myers Awards for Outstanding Children's Literature are given by We Need Diverse Books and celebrate diverse books by diverse creators. The awards are named for prolific children's and young adult author Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014), the third National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and a champion of diversity in children's books.
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| Ellen Oh | |
Ellen Oh, WNDB executive director, opened the event by recalling the creation of WNDB and two March 2014 New York Times opinion pieces written by Walter Dean Myers and his son, Christopher Myers. Both "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" by Walter Dean Myers and "The Apartheid of Children's Literature" by Christopher Myers begin with a statistic: according to a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, of the 3,200 children's books published in 2013, just 93 were about Black people. (Oh noted that only 18 of those 3,200 books were about Asian Americans, which she knows because her debut, Prophecy, was one of those 18.) We Need Diverse Books became a nonprofit in July 2014; as of 2022, the CCBC reported that 40% of the titles it received were by a person of color. This "includes 18% (634 books) that had at least one Asian creator, 13% (462) that had at least one Black creator, and 11% (371) that had at least one Latine creator." In the 10 years since Myers's death, WNDB has donated tens of thousands of books to the more than four million students across the U.S. who have been affected by book bans. "Today," Oh said, "is a celebration day."
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| Judges (l.-r.) Jamie Kurumaji, Jeremiah Henderson, Sara Martínez, Siân Gaetano, Hanna Lee, Jamila Zahra Felton, Sarah DeMicheli, Jenell Igeleke Penn, Hadeal Salamah | |
National Book Award-winner Elizabeth Acevedo, Young People's Poet Laureate, 2019 Walter Award winner, and event moderator greeted the crowd of adults and students from eight local schools. "We are here to celebrate the winners and honorees and honor the life of the award's namesake," she began. However, Acevedo said, quoting Walter Dean Myers, "There is work to be done." The work "we are here to honor today," she said, "is also under attack. In the first eight months of 2023 alone, ALA tracked nearly 700 attempts to ban library books. Even worse, many of these bans target diverse voices." There is work to be done "and we are here to do it because we all know books are precious and they can even save lives." After Acevedo presented the winners with their medals, Tison and Woodson gave brief remarks.
"Numerous books this award has honored have been mentor texts to me," Ari Tison started, and even an award book from this year--Sawyerr's All the Fighting Parts--is a book that "changed my life already." Tison said that her title, Saints of the Household, made her braver in her own healing journey, and makes her "feel now more than ever how sacred life is--may we continue to fight for [the children] and hear them." Tison, who is Bribri (Indigenous Costa Rican) American, celebrated that "folks are growing ready for books like mine.... Diversity is reality. We, humanity, contain multitudes. Therefore, our art should contain the same reality. I both congratulate us for being here and give encouragement for us to keep going until the world of books looks like the world."
Jacqueline Woodson reminisced about the early days of WNDB, around the same time as the publication of her National Book Award and John Newbery Medal-winning Brown Girl Dreaming. "I'm so proud to be a part of it now and to watch the metamorphosis and change that can happen in our lifetime." Woodson shared a story about a "smart and talented and loving family" with whom she is close, and how utterly remarkable the family's young daughter is. Walter Dean Myers, the late patriarch of this family, she said "would have been so proud of this trio." Myers would have "loved this room," Woodson said, referring to the auditorium. "He would have loved WNDB doing the work and the books being awarded. He would have grinned and been flattered about the award being named for him, then he would have said 'no thank you.' He would have said 'the work goes on.' " Woodson told the audience she will not keep this award--she plans to give it to Myers's granddaughter. "I am so grateful to have known Walter. He was a dear friend to me. In this moment, with all of you doing the work, like Walter, I am grinning, I am proud, and I am grateful."
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| Panelists Acevedo, Tison, Sawyerr, Thompkins-Bigelow, Woodson (photo: Nancy Anderson) | |
A panel discussion moderated by Acevedo and featuring both the winners and honorees immediately followed the speeches. The conversation was excellent and Acevedo's questions insightful, creating many moments of interesting debate and conversation. Acevedo's first question--where they were 10 years ago in their writing journey--highlighted the very different lives of each woman on stage, Thompkins-Bigelow said, "Ten years ago I was a mom of a four-year-old and had just had a baby." [Said four-year-old was in the audience, now 14, filming every moment his mother was on stage.] "I wasn't writing yet and I was falling in love with picture books. I was falling in love, but I was feeling a sadness--I really wanted to see Black Muslim children in books. I wanted my son to be in books. I didn't even pick up a pen until 2015." Sawyerr described herself as "a high school senior and a really annoying writer--I was annoyingly passionate." Woodson's response had a bit of understandable weariness to it: "Brown Girl Dreaming had just won the National Book Award and I won't go into detail about what happened at the dinner." [Author Daniel Handler introduced Woodson by making a, in Woodson's words, "wink-nudge joke about being Black." Her response, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke" was published in the New York Times.] "It was time for change. I feel like that was a point when we were really taking a hard look at what was going on in children's literature," she finished. Tison was, like Sawyerr, a senior in high school: "I grew up in an awful house and my reaction to that was to be an overachiever. When I was 18, I saved up enough money to buy myself a novel-writing workshop. I think about that 18-year-old me and all the energy she put in. All the tenacity." Acevedo went on to ask the authors about their processes, what writing teaches them about themselves, what their definition of success is, and then to home in on specific parts of each work, such as how this is the first time many of the Bribri stories in Tison's book have been translated into English.
Around 20 young people in the audience asked questions that were insightful, hard-hitting, and tender. One asked, "How do you find your voice in a space where so many concepts are recycled?" The impressed panelists paused to collect their thoughts before answering. Thompkins-Bigelow said that she writes for the young girl she used to be: "When I start with her first--what is the book that she wants--that's when I can find my unique voice." Woodson suggested the young reader "stop engaging with that recycled content. I think if you pick up a book and it feels like something you've read before, you don't have to engage with it. You know when you find that book that speaks to you because that's the one you read again and again." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness