Well THAT was exciting! Exciting and fun and not a single winner of today’s awards made me bang my head on a table at any point. Hooray! That’s what constitutes a good year, in my book. If you’re curious about what won, the press release listing the authors can be found here. We can now officially call this The Year of the Floras (with Flora and Ulysses winning the Newbery on the one hand and Flora and the Flamingo winning a Caldecott Honor on the other). Colleen AF Venable pointed out that if you just shorten that to The Year of the Flo’s then you could include Caldecott winner Brian Floca. Alexander London, on the other hand, may win for his comment, “that gives me hope that next year will be all about Fauna”.
So in case you missed it, the dear Lori Ess and I had a little show before and after the award announcements. It was to combat the usual Muzak they play each year. This year the Muzak was a little more . . . ah . . . vibrant than usual, let’s say. As such you can see Lori and I rocking out to the jams here. If ALA needs back-up dancers next year, we are available.
If you’d like to laugh at our predictions (or be wowed by the accuracy of our guest predictors) here is the Pre-Game Show:
And here is the Post-Game Show where we scream and promote and generally have a lot of fun. If you want some commentary on trends this year, what didn’t make it, and the surprises that did, here’s the thing to watch:
I’d like to thank SLJ for this opportunity. We had a truly marvelous time and really couldn’t have done this without them. Thanks especially to Kathy Ishizuka and Guy Gonzalez who were kind enough to get up at an ungodly hour to walk us through the process. And thank you to my co-host Lori Ess, the best a gal could hope for.
And finally, here is a picture of our reactions when the Newbery winner was announced. As Kathy put it this, “is what Cartier-Bresson termed ‘the decisive moment’.”
