Johanna Harness' Spillworthy was recently awarded a gold Moonbeam Children's Book Award.
Launched in 2007, the awards are intended to bring increased recognition to exemplary children’s books and their creators, and to celebrate children’s books and life-long reading. Congratulations to all the winners! This year's Moonbeam Awards medal ceremony will be held in conjunction with the 5th annual Traverse City Children’s Book Festival, on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Creating books that inspire our children to read, to learn, and to dream is an extremely important task, and these awards were conceived to reward those efforts. Each year's entries are judged by expert panels of youth educators, librarians, booksellers, and book reviewers of all ages. Award recipients receive gold, silver and bronze medals and stickers depicting a mother and child reading and silhouetted by a full moon.
"I'm so excited and honored. I still don't quite know how to process this. It's amazing.
I look at the Moonbeam books and realize that this is exactly the kind of list that made me want to start writing, and it's exactly the kind of list that made me fall in love with independent publishing.
Pre-Internet, these were the books I would search for in catalogs and on pilgrimages to huge, urban booksellers. Today these books can be just as difficult to find because they get lost in the noise of publishing.
It's difficult to describe the feeling I get from these books.
It's difficult to describe the feeling I get from these books.
Have you ever savored a magazine with images selected because they did NOT look like stock photography? An old Mothering magazine? Or an old New Moon Girls? I'm not talking about sloppy or unprofessional. I'm talking about real.
That's the feeling I look for in independently-published books. I'm looking for ideas that aren't changed to fit a preconceived idea of what an audience wants--the literary version of photoshopping. I'm looking for stories and ideas that certainly could have been changed to make them more marketable, but they were tumbled into something organic and real instead. They include a variety of characters, like those who actually exist in the world, without slimming or whitewashing or idealizing of dominant culture. And the covers reflect the guts of the novels! They are beautiful not in spite of being real, but because they are real.
I already have a huge reading list shaped from Moonbeam lists from multiple years. Now I must talk to librarians about getting more of these books on the shelves because my budget is too small and my list is too big.
Thank you, Moonbeam, not just for this award, but also for your dedication in bringing independent books to the attention of serious readers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you."
That's the feeling I look for in independently-published books. I'm looking for ideas that aren't changed to fit a preconceived idea of what an audience wants--the literary version of photoshopping. I'm looking for stories and ideas that certainly could have been changed to make them more marketable, but they were tumbled into something organic and real instead. They include a variety of characters, like those who actually exist in the world, without slimming or whitewashing or idealizing of dominant culture. And the covers reflect the guts of the novels! They are beautiful not in spite of being real, but because they are real.
I already have a huge reading list shaped from Moonbeam lists from multiple years. Now I must talk to librarians about getting more of these books on the shelves because my budget is too small and my list is too big.
Thank you, Moonbeam, not just for this award, but also for your dedication in bringing independent books to the attention of serious readers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you."
No comments:
Post a Comment