Clarion Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin, walked off with both the Newbery and Caldecott awards, announced last Monday at the American Library Association's midwinter meeting in New Orleans. David Wiesner, author and illustrator of The Three Pigs, won the 2002 Randolph Caldecott Medal, and Linda Sue Park won the 2002 John Newbery Medal for her novel A Single Shard. The Newbery and Caldecott medals honor outstanding writing and illustration of works published in the U.S. during the previous year. Both books were edited by Clarion editorial director Dinah Stevenson.
Wiesner won the Caldecott Medal 10 years ago, for Tuesday, and also won a 2000 Caldecott Honor for Sector 7. Park, a first-time winner and author of three novels, is the first Asian-American to receive a Newbery Medal.
Three Caldecott Honor Books were also announced: Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., illustrated by Bryan Collier and written by Doreen Rappaport (Hyperion/Jump at the Sun); The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, illustrated by Brian Selznick and written by Barbara Kerley (Scholastic Press); and The Stray Dog by Marc Simont (HarperCollins).
Two Newbery Honor Books were announced as well: Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath (FSG) and Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson (Front Street Books).
Front Street also took top honors in the third annual Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults, for A Step from Heaven by An Na. Four Printz Honor Books were named: Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art, edited by Jan Greenberg (Abrams); Freewill by Chris Lynch (HarperCollins); The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson (Delacorte); and True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff (Atheneum).
The Robert F. Sibert Award, for the most distinguished informational book for children, was won by Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845—1850 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Houghton Mifflin).
Mildred D. Taylor won the 2002 Coretta Scott King Author Award for The Land (Penguin Putnam/Fogelman), and Jerry Pinkney won the King Illustrator Award for Goin' Someplace Special, written by Patricia McKissack (Atheneum/Schwartz). Jerome Lagarrigue, illustrator of Freedom Summer, written by Deborah Wiles (Atheneum/ Schwartz), received the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award.
After the awards were announced, Clarion went back to press for another 75,000 copies of A Single Shard (10,000 copies were previously in print) and another 59,000 copies of The Three Pigs (65,000 were already in print).
