New York – Amina Luqman-Dawson’s Freewater, an intermediate novel about a secret community of formerly enslaved people, won the John Newbery Medal for Best Children’s Book of the Year. Doug Salati’s Hot Dog, about the summer wanderings of urban pets, won the Randolph Caldecott Award for Outstanding Illustration.
Newbery and Caldecott are two of the oldest and most prestigious children’s book awards, each dating back over 80 years.
Luqman-Dawson also won the Coretta Scott King Award for best fairy tale by a black author. The King Award for Illustration went to Frank Morrison for Confronting the Need for Prayer: A Contemporary Retelling of a Classic Her Spirituality by Carol Boston Weatherford.
Co-authored with former Olympic gold medalist Tommy Smith, his famous protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics, Victory. and was a King Award finalist for both author and illustrator.
Jason Reynolds, author of “Ghost” and “The Boy in the Black Suit,” and Claudette Macklin, founder of the Center for Multicultural Children’s Literature Research, each received a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The awards were announced by the American Library Association on Monday and are currently being collected for LibLearnX: The Library Learning Experience in New Orleans.
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