The National Book Foundation has announced the 2020 National Book Award longlist for Young People’s Literature. The five finalists will be named on October 6, and the winner will be announced during a virtual ceremony on November 18.
The 2020 longlist for Young People’s Literature:
King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender (Scholastic Press)
We Are Not Free by Traci Chee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box by Evette Dionne (Viking)
Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth (Levine Querido)
Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh (Dutton)
When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed (Dial)
Trowbridge Road by Marcella Pixley (Candlewick)
How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Adventure by John Rocco (Crown)
The Way Back by Gavriel Savit (Knopf)
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Macmillan/Swoon Reads)
All of the authors featured on this year’s longlist are first time nominees for the National Book Awards. Three of the books are debuts: Every Body Looking, Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, and Cemetery Boys. And two titles are in verse, Apple (Skin to the Core) and Every Body Looking.
A total of 311 books were submitted for the 2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The judges are Joan Trygg (chair), Randy Ribay, Neal Shusterman, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Colleen AF Venable.
