The Western Writers of America have announced their 2005 Spur award winners in the children’s/YA divisions:
Best Western Juvenile Fiction
Spur Winner: Fire In The Hole by Mary Cronk Farrell (Clarion Books, 2004).
Finalists: Worth by Alexandria LaFaye (Simon & Schuster, 2004); Nothing Here But Stones by Nancy Oswald (Henry Holt, 2004).
Best Western Juvenile Nonfiction
Spur Winner: Rattlesnake Mesa…Stories from a Native American Childhood by Ednah New Rider Weber (Lee & Low, 2004).
Finalists: Friday The Arapaho Boy by Marc Simmons (University of New Mexico Press, 2004); Hear That Train Whistle Blow by Milton Metzer (Random House, 2004).
Storyteller (picture book)*
Spur Winner: Apples To Oregon by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter (Simon & Schuster, 2004).
Finalists: Old Coyote by Nancy Wood, illustrated by Max Grafe (Candlewick Press, 2004), and Jim Thorpe’s Bright Path by Joseph Bruchac, illustrated by S.D. Nelson (Lee & Low, 2004).
Note: Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2000) was a finalist for the WWA Storyteller Award.
Cynsational News & Links
Fire In The Hole! from Through The Looking Glass Children’s Book Review.
Who Wrote That? Featuring Alexandria LaFaye from Patricia M. Newman. Featured in California Kids! April 2004. See also A. LaFaye Discovers Her Worth by Roxyanne Young from Smartwriters.com (February 2005).
Yesterday, I was pleased to hear from my HarperCollins editor, Rosemary Brosnan, that both the library and trade editions of my picture book, Jingle Dancer, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu, (Morrow/Harper, 2000), are going into reprint (again!).
Congratulations to my pal, Sara Shacter, on the sale of her first book (a picture book to Red Rock Press)! Sara and I know each other from my Chicago days with SCBWI-Illinois.
Congrats also to Greg, who received his author copies of the paperback edition of Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo (Little Brown, 2005) yesterday. Very cool how the front of the cover features the seal signifying his Parents’ Choice Gold Medal and the back features quotes from his sparkling reviews! The paperback will be simultaneously released with the hardcover of its companion book, Tofu And T.Rex, this July.