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Some terrific news came this week from the Buckeye Children’s Book Award, and I’m honored as can be that Ohio’s youngest readers have selected Shark Vs. Train as their favorite book of 2011. Thanks for reading and voting, kids — don’t ever, ever stop!

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Yesterday morning, I learned that Shark Vs. Train is among the 2012-13 nominees for the Association of Indiana School Library Educators’ Young Hoosier Book Award. Yes, I posted the happy news in the usual social media spots. But I also took the time to email the YHBA committee chairs to thank them directly.

It took a little doing to find out who the chairs are and track down their email addresses, but nothing compared to the work that the committee did in narrowing the candidate titles down to the 55 or 60 that made the final middle grade, intermediate, and picture book lists. (It’s a good-looking bunch of books. Seriously, you should check it out.) I truly am appreciative of the committee’s efforts, and I’m honored to have now had both The Day-Glo Brothers and Shark Vs. Train on YHBA lists, and I want them to know that.

Besides, I learned earlier this year just what a big payoff there can be for my spending a few minutes chasing down that contact information and sending an email. When Shark Vs. Train was named to the Texas Library Association’s 2×2 Reading List, I emailed my thanks to the committee members. From that one act of basic good manners came an invitation for a solid week of presentations at the nine elementary schools in the district of one of those committee members.

If I had been inclined to see such a thank-you email as purely optional, that turn of events surely cured me of it. Saying thanks for that sort of recognition isn’t optional; it’s a must-do. And I don’t think it’s enough to simply exude an appreciative vibe via tweet or status update — I really believe that the thank-you is more genuine and sincere when it goes directly to the people being thanked.

The bottom line: Authors and illustrators and any other professionals using the one-to-multitudes reach of social media, don’t forget the power of the one-to-one thank-you note.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get this blog post up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…

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The time has arrived to nominate your favorite children’s and YA books from the past year for the 2011 Cybils. You’ve got only until October 15, so I’ll keep this brief.

(Actually, I’m done. So go nominate something already!)

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Libraries and librarians have been sending some great news my way lately.

In the past few weeks, I’ve learned that The Day-Glo Brothers is a nominee for the 2011-2012 Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards Program sponsored by the Pennsylvania School Libraries Association, and that Shark Vs. Train has been named to three nifty lists:

The Chicago Public Library’s 2010 Best of the Best list

The Texas Library Association’s 2011 2×2 list

The Illinois School Library Media Association’s 2012 Monarch Award list

I just wish that libraries and librarians were on the receiving end of more good news lately. I wrote about this in my Bartography Express newsletter last weekend:

We all love our libraries — even Shark and Train — but it’s never been more important that we take the time to say so. State and city and school district budgets this year include deep, shortsighted cuts for libraries and librarians and the services they provide. These are bad news for all of us and especially for the children in our society. If we want to be a better educated, better informed, better prepared people, none of us — not one — will come out ahead if these sorts of cuts go through.

The Texas Library Association has provided this tool for emailing Gov. Perry and state senators and representatives to advocate on behalf of the institutions — and the people who make them run — that are such a vital part of our society, democracy and culture. If your state library association does the same, I urge you to take advantage of it.

One bright spot for librarians, at least, is the new book by one of their own, Jeanette Larson. In her post-librarian career (though I really wonder if such a thing exists), Jeanette has written the lovely Hummingbirds: Facts and Folklore from the Americas, just published by Charlesbridge. It’s a beautiful book, and I hope you’ll all be able to find it on the shelves of your local library.

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I’m always glad to hear from Susan at Chicken Spaghetti, but never more so than this afternoon when she sent me the news that Shark Vs. Train has been named by Publishers Weekly as one of the year’s best picture books.

It shows up at the top of the list, but that’s just alphabetical-order-by-author’s-last-name at work. First, last, or in the middle, I’m delighted to be included on a list that features so many impressive titles. And it’s certainly nice to receive this vote of confidence for a book that I’ll be reading aloud to nine — count ‘em! — different audiences this coming week.

Thanks to co-conspirator Tom Lichtenheld, and to Publishers Weekly for the honor, and to Susan for letting me know about it!

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There’s been some great interstate news of late for both The Day-Glo Brothers and Shark Vs. Train.

Yesterday’s mail brought an envelope with a return address of “Executive Residence, State of Wisconsin.” I last visited the state for the wedding of a cousin who had both Metallica and Lou Reed played at his reception. A great time was had by all, but that was five years ago this weekend, so I was reasonably sure that the statute of limitations had expired.

Sure enough, the mail was entirely unrelated. It was a letter from First Lady of Wisconsin Jessica Doyle informing me that Shark Vs. Train has been picked as September’s featured Primary book for the Read On Wisconsin! online book club. (See this post from Rebecca Hogue Wojahn for more on this year’s selections.)

On its own, that would have been terrific enough, but it’s coupled with news that The Day-Glo Brothers is a nominee for the Land Of Enchantment Book Award (sponsored by the New Mexico Library Association and the New Mexico Council of the International Reading Association) and has also made the 2010-2011 Reading List for the Maine Student Book Award (sponsored by the Maine Library Association, the Maine Association of School Libraries, and the Maine Reading Association).

Many thanks to the folks in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Maine for their recognition of Bob and Joe and Shark and Train!

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You can have your Valentine’s Day chocolates. For me, nothing today could be sweeter than the fact that the Cybils (Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards) have given the 2009 prize for nonfiction picture books to The Day-Glo Brothers.

Well, actually, what makes this award sweeter still is seeing my friend Liz Scanlon’s All the World right there above The Day-Glo Brothers on the list of this year’s winners. Congratulations to Liz and to our books’ illustrators, Marla Frazee and Tony Persiani, and to all of this year’s winners and finalists — and a huge “Thank you!” to all the Cybils panelists and judges. I hope you’re all savoring today and getting tomorrow off.

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Today has been one of the best days of my life, and if you’re reading this, you’re one of the reasons.

The American Library Association media awards (Newbery, Caldecott, etc.) were announced today, and The Day-Glo Brothers was honored as a runner-up for the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal.

And that was great, absolutely. But it wasn’t the best part.

The best part has been hearing from so many people — by email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, blog post, and hugs and kisses (thanks, Darlin’) — who are so happy to share in this good news (and to laugh about this). Some are lifelong friends, some I met only in passing last week, and one was someone I had lost track of years ago and never expected to hear from again. Many are themselves writers and artists, and some had great news of their own to be congratulated on today, which I was only too happy to do.

The sense of community that I have cherished ever since I first realized that there was a children’s literature community has been in overdrive today. I haven’t gotten any (OK, much) work done today, but I haven’t minded a bit. Without that community, these past nine-plus years would not have been nearly as fun, and today would not have been one of the best of my life.

Thank you.

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This caught my eye last week:

Announcing The Willie Morris Award for Fiction
This annual award will honor the author of the best book of fiction set in the Southern United States.

The winning book should reflect, in the words of Willie Morris, "hope for belonging, for belief in a people's better nature, for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or rootless or destructive." [emphasis mine]

The winning novel will be chosen for the quality of its prose, its originality, and for authenticity of setting and characters.

The author will receive $1000, an expense paid trip to New York City, and be a featured lecturer at The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction.

The first award will celebrate a novel published in 2007, and the first lecture will take place in October, 2008.

It doesn't say that the book must be intended for an adult audience, and so it occurs to me that surely there must be at least one YA novel from 2007 that fits the bill.

Maybe that's just Looking for Alaska talking -- I think Willie Morris would have loved the beautiful, impulsive, unknowable title character in John Green's 2005 debut. And I think Willie Morris would have identified with narrator Miles Halter's search for the "Great Perhaps," which to me sounds a lot like what Morris was looking for when he left Yazoo City, Mississippi, for the University of Texas at Austin.

"Something different was stirring around in my future," Morris wrote in North Toward Home, "and I would brood over the place where I was and some place where I would end up, and for days I carried a map of the University of Texas in my shirt pocket. I was bathing in self-drama; perhaps it was my imagination, which had never failed me even as a child, that sought some unknown awakening."

(A bit about Willie Morris: If, like me, you've been even half-serious about newspaper journalism as a UT student in the past 40 years, there's a good chance you've been through a "Willie Morris" period -- lasting at least long enough to read North Toward Home and, in some cases, with no evident expiration date. The highlight of mine was the dinner he treated me to at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, Mississippi, as I drove back to Austin after a spring of magazine internships in New York City.)

Anyway, a cursory search for 2007 YA and middle-grade titles yielded a few potential candidates for The Willie Morris Award --

• When I Crossed No-Bob by Margaret McMullan
• Picture Perfect by D. Anne Love
• The Baptism by Shelia P. Moses
• Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson
• My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow

-- so if you know the authors I hope you'll tip them off to this award (and the March 1 deadline), and if you can suggest other titles in the comments here, please do.

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This is scary. The Boston Globe reports: "Nevertheless, the Harry Potter craze, as distinct from the books, does not have everybody smiling. Notwithstanding the millions of books sold, a report on children's reading by the National Endowment for the Arts, due to be released in the fall, finds that reading among adolescent children is in trouble. 'Reading scores and rates seem to be going up in the age 7-11 range,' NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said in an interview. 'But when kids hit high school, all the social pressure takes them away from reading and you see an enormous fall, to a point where most kids are almost not reading at all. A quarter of all kids read for pleasure. Most of the others don't. Because kids read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. God bless Harry Potter, and please send us many more. But one book or series of books is not strong enough to counterbalance the trends.'"





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