Stacy: Welcome to the Clermont County Public Library’s Booklovers Podcast. I’m your host today. My name is Stacy and I’m joined by two youth services librarians, Cara and Kristine. Hi guys. During this episode, we’re going to discuss the Newbery award. We’re really excited! We’re going to talk about the criteria used by the Newbery committee and our two guests are going to discuss their predictions for the 2022 Newbery award.

Stacy: Remember that show notes with links to all the titles we talk about are available at clermontlibrary.org.  And I’m going to kick things off and talk a little bit about what the Newbery award is and about the exciting anniversary coming up. So, this is the first in a series of four podcasts that we’re doing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Newbery award.

A brief history of the Newbery Award

Stacy: So just a little bit about the creation of the award. First of all, the Newbery medal is given by the Association for Library Service to Children, which is a division of the American Library Association. And it is given to the author of “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.”

Stacy: And it’s given to books that were published the previous year. So, the 2022 awards will go to books published in 2021. Some quick history: in 1921, Publishers Weekly editor Frederick Melcher proposed the award to the American Library Association meeting of the children’s librarian section and suggested that it be named for the 18th century English bookseller, John Newbery. The idea was enthusiastically accepted by the children’s librarians and Melcher’s official proposal was approved by the American Library Association board in 1922. The Newbery award thus became the very first children’s book award in the world. From the beginning of the awarding of the Newbery medal, committees could and usually did cite other books as worthy of attention.

Newbery Honor books

Stacy: So, such books were referred to as Newbery runners-up, but in 1971, the term runners-up was changed to honor books. And actually, a lot of my favorites are not Newbery medals. They’re Newbery honor books. So, we’ll be talking about that a little bit too. So that new terminology was made retroactive and that allowed all the former runners-up to now be referred to as Newbery honor books.

100 years of Newbery Awards

Stacy: So, listeners if you heard me say at the beginning and you paid attention to the date of the first Newbery Medal it was awarded in 1922. You’ll realize that 2022 marks the 100th anniversary. So, the Association for Library Service to Children says about this anniversary, “This anniversary commemorates not only a century of captivating books, it celebrates the longevity and evolution of the award. The world has changed in the last 100 years. And with it, the Newbery medal seeks to recognize stories that represent and respect all youth.” I think all children’s librarians are excited for this historic anniversary and perhaps none more than our two guests today. So next Cara has some great information about how each year’s Newbery committee is formed and the criteria that they use to choose winners.

Newbery committee and criteria

Cara: Thanks so much for having us, Stacy, and for saying how excited we are about the Newbery. It’s true. I consider myself a Newbery nerd. I always read all the books that might be up for the Medal every year. So I love to talk about the Newberys. The process and information about the committee is pretty complicated, so if anybody wants to delve into that, that is on the American Library Association’s (ALA) website.

Choosing the Newbery committee

Cara: You can check out the Newbery manual there, which is about 70 pages of dense information, so I tried to narrow it down into just the basics, to give an overview. Every year they pick a new committee to choose the Newbery Medal, so you never really know what you’re going to get, because they all kind of start from scratch, other than that manual.

Cara: Because everything’s confidential, you don’t know what the previous committee talked about or how they made their choices, which is a really cool way to go about it, because every year’s awards are really different based on that committee.

Cara: So they start the process over every year in January at the ALA’s mid-winter meeting; that’s when the new committee meets. And that’s also when they’re awarding that year’s awards. So that committee is kind of ending their term, and the new committee’s coming on. And every committee is made up of 15 members.

Cara: They’re all members of that group that Stacy mentioned, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). They make nominations all year long for books that they think should be considered. So they’re kind of in constant communication with each other, whether that be, in the past, they communicated by mail; recently they’ve had to do it virtually because of the pandemic.

Committee communications

Cara: Usually they’re meeting in person if they can, but of course the