On Making Judgments: Looking Back on the 2001 National Book Awards/Young People's Literature

In the spring of 2001, I was asked to chair the National Book Awards' Young People's Literature Jury, and I took that task on with trepidation. I worked with four others who knew the genre well—Kay Cassell, Ellen Howard, Lisa Clayton Robinson, and Jane Resh Thomas—and among the many questions we asked each other and ourselves were: What is genuine? What has real meaning? What must ultimately endure?

We were sent some 160 new books—biographies, picture books, novels, poetry, plays, science, fantasy, history, memoir, even one quasi cookbook. I watched them pile up in the corner of my already-wheezing office. As a team we were determined to honor the five best titles we were given to consider. We concerned ourselves with matters of framing, form, and voice; with credibility and characterization, with the execution of plot or storyline. We studied the language—was it rigorous? Tantalizing? Fresh? We explored dynamics pertaining to originality and mood, meaning and soul. We thought out loud about each book’s innate capacity to alert, embolden, and inspire. Enduring books are, I think, the ones that enter the blood streams of their readers; that stir and shape and finally transform. They are the ones that get passed on, parent to child, friend to friend, the ones that jolt us toward insight, compassion, idea, hope, politics, or love. Toward the answers to the questions we must keep asking.

The five books we finally nominated for the 2001 Young People’s Literature Award answered to every conceivable literary standard, and I still heartily recommend them to you today. There was An Na’s masterful A Step from Heaven, a book that remove the veil from the immigrant experience. There was Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems—brilliant, elegant, intelligent. There was Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising, which is haunting and gorgeous. There was Phillip Hoose’s tour-de-force We Were There. And then there was the winner, Virginia Euwer’s Wolff’s True Believer, which we found audacious and fabulous, an entire novel presented as a poem.

I encourage you to seek out these books, for they don't just tell us stories. They tell us how the very best books get made, which is a lesson that I'm forever learning.