Stacy: Hello, and welcome to Clermont County Public Library’s Booklovers Podcast. I’m your host today, Stacy, and I am joined by two youth services librarians, Cara and Kristine.

Stacy: During this episode, we’re going to talk about nontraditional winners of past Newbery awards, some predictions of possible nontraditional winners for the 2022 Newbery awards and exactly what we mean by nontraditional.

And that’s probably the best place to start. Remember that show notes with links to all of the titles we talk about is available at clermontlibrary.org. Cara is going to get us started today.

Cara: Yeah. Thanks so much for having us, Stacy.

Nontraditional Newbery titles

Stacy: Thank you guys for being here. I’m excited to talk about this because it’s kind of a weird – I don’t know what to call it, not a phenomenon, but it’s just, it’s just kind of fun to talk about something nontraditional.

What do we mean by nontraditional?

Cara: Right, exactly. And we should probably point out that nontraditional is our term that we came up with, so that’s not an official Newbery term. When we look at the history of the Newbery award, the vast majority of the medals and honor winners have been awarded to middle-grade chapter books. So that’s fictional titles that are marketed at readers ages nine to 12.

Cara: But the committee is technically welcome to consider, or charged with considering, any book that’s written for children ages zero to 14. So that’s a much broader spectrum than what we usually see. As long as those fall within their criteria, so books that are original, they have US authors, things like that.

A book different from usual

Cara: So what we’re considering nontraditional titles are anything that’s not a middle grade novel, so picture books, graphic novels, nonfiction titles, those are all eligible. And they have all been recognized before for Newbery, especially in recent years; we’re definitely seeing more nontraditional choices and more diversity of authors and characters, which is very exciting to see, that the committee’s branching out.

Cara: But because the Newbery’s an award for literature, they have to consider the text of a book. So that means that they’re considering any form of writing, but only the writing, as far as we understand. Now I did recently hear a Newbery committee member talking about this, and he was kind of dancing around, “what is the definition of text?”

What’s considered text

Cara: So that really intrigued me because we typically think of that as the written words, but he seemed to be insinuating that you might consider something else to be text, in books that have illustrated components. So I’m not exactly sure what he was getting at there, but it’s an interesting concept.

Cara: So all forms of writing, including nonfiction, poetry, plays, and the text of graphic novels and picture books, and the manual for the Newbery award is clear that they can only consider illustrations if they detract from the text. So they make the book less effective. And I’ve always wondered how they can truly separate the text from the illustrations, in those cases, to consider them separately.

Cara: But he’s kind of, the person that I heard speaking, seemed like he was alluding to the fact that maybe they are considering the illustration sometimes, in some form or fashion. But since their meetings are confidential, we don’t know how they consider those. And we’ll probably never know.

Stacy: I know, is this the panelist that we heard talk on Friday?

Cara: Yes.

Stacy: We all watched this webinar, this great webinar about the Newbery awards.

Cara: I think that’s right.

Stacy: So, he was talking about, I forget which book was he talking about? Was it The Undefeated maybe that he was talking about?

Does the committee even see the illustrations

Cara: It might be. I know he mentioned Crown specifically because I thought it was interesting that he said that he never saw the pictures. He said he got a typed manuscript and I’ve never heard anyone refer to how they’ve seen a book with illustrations as a committee member. So I thought that was really interesting.

Stacy: So that’s what I was thinking about too. And then I thought, well, in their line of work, they’re librarians, they would have had to see that book at some point altogether the text and the illustrations in circulation in their library. So, I’m like, how do you, after seeing that and before awarding the Newbery, how do you still differentiate those in your mind?

Stacy: Like, is that even humanly possible?

Cara: Is that how they read that many books?

Stacy: That part, I think of all like the rules, that’s the part that fascinates me the most.