During a ceremony on June 30 at the American Library Association’s annual conference in San Diego, the winners of this year’s top awards for children’s literature accepted their medals and honors.
The audience gave Vashti Harrison a standing ovation as she took to the podium to receive the 2024 Randolph Caldecott Medal for her picture book Big (Little, Brown). “Did you know you’re the first Black woman to win the Caldecott Medal?” she recalled her agent, Carrie Hannigan, asking her after she got the call in January. Acknowledging the momentous occasion, Harrison also paid tribute to the Black women artists whose “determination and creativity” helped paved the way, including Caldecott Honorees Carole Byard, Ekua Holmes, Oge Mora, and Faith Ringgold. “I hope my journey here, to this moment, opens up a pathway for more of us to come,” she said.
Harrison spoke of her personal experiences with anti-fat and adultification biases as a girl, citing a study from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality that revealed that “adults view Black girls as young as five as less innocent and more adult than their white counterparts, which results in their believing that Black girls need less nurturing and less protection.” As an artist, she said, “I pushed myself to draw curvy bodies, fat bodies with dark skin,” perhaps as “a correction, a confrontation, a subtle form of exposure therapy.”
She hopes her book will help young Black girls, and “anyone who needs it,” to confront society’s assumptions and be proud to inhabit their growing bodies. “Every visual choice I made was to bring readers inside the girl’s perspective, to ask them to feel what she is feeling, so when the book is shouting, You are allowed to take up space, you are allowed to grow and change! You are okay! You are good! I hope it rings true inside of you.”
Accepting the Newbery Medal for his middle grade novel The Eyes and the Impossible (McSweeney’s and Knopf), Dave Eggers shared memories of two life-changing teachers who set him on the path to writing: Mrs. Wright, in first grade, and Mrs. Dunn in fifth. “I benefited from an unbroken string of gifted teachers in my little Illinois town,” he said, recalling the first books he created for school assignments, and how both Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Dunn “validated” his “very strange stories.” He experienced an early and pivotal moment of recognition for his writing when one of his stories won a contest for young authors in his home state, presented by Gwendolyn Brooks, the Poet Laureate of Illinois. “I was never the same. Mrs. Dunn thought I might belong in the world of writers, and Gwendolyn Brooks echoed the sentiment. I had a path.”
Eggers declared, “We don’t come close to properly compensating teachers for what they do, which is to daily change lives. To daily create citizens. To daily tell us what is right and what is wrong, and what is possible. And every day to catapult young minds forward.”
The author ended his speech by invoking the power of books to channel the human spirit and by thanking the brave librarians who defend books against censorship. “Books are simply souls in paper form, so when we accept a strange book, we accept a strange soul.... And once this soul has been welcomed to the library—which is nothing less than a repository of souls—it cannot be unwelcomed. Librarians are the keepers and protectors of all history’s souls, its outcasts and oddballs, its screamers and whisperers, all of whom have a right to be heard.”
Concluding the ceremony, Pam Muñoz Ryan accepted the Children’s Literature Legacy Award for her contribution to literature for young people and her dedication to promoting authentic Latinx representation. She shined a light on her family, including her children and grandchildren who were in attendance, saying, “If I have ever brought anything of significance into this world, it is them. No accolades or laurels will ever compare with their magnificence or my love for them. Although, tonight comes close.”
Ryan thanked her editors and team at Scholastic. Back when she wrote her debut novel, Esperanza Rising (2000), she said, “There were only a handful of stories written by and about Latinos in the United States. I am so grateful for their leap of faith and commitment to me and to diverse books.”
Returning to the importance of her family, she said, “What nurtured my love of story were my grandmothers, who were steeped in proverbs, cautionary tales, and gossip—storytelling in its finest form.” Although Ryan used to be “mortified” when her grandmother Esperanza gushed over her in public, asking people, “Isn’t she beautiful?,” she now reflects, “Isn’t that something for which we all hope? That someone will see the beauty inside of us, no matter our countenance, challenges, color, gender, ethnicity. And isn’t that something for which we hope for young readers, too?”
Ryan closed by sounding a note of hope. As artists, she said, “We write and draw, shackled to the beautiful tyranny of now. We work with hearts full of hope for the future, and the promise of unknown communions.... I don’t know where this journey will continue to lead me. But I’m so very grateful that all of us in this room will make it together. I can’t wait to find out what comes next.”
