My Experience Serving on the 2014 Pritz Committee

I just returned from the ALA Midwinter conference in Philadelphia, where I spent four days in closed meetings with the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature committee. We decided the 2014 award winner and chose four “honor books” which also represent the best writing in young adult literature. I’ve spent a year working “virtually” with this committee to schedule readers, share notes, and nominate titles. Alongside the other 9 committee members, I read hundreds of YA books published in 2013. Our vote at ALA Midwinter was the culmination of a year’s worth of reading, discussing, note-taking, and collaboration.

The awards were announced at the conference on Monday morning, during the Youth Media Awards. This event has been described as the “Oscars for kids’ books” and the excitement and buzz in the room makes it feel like just that. Nearly every conversation I had leading up to the award ceremony included speculation from colleagues on the winners. Everyone was rooting for their favorite books and this time of year, “kidlit” blogs are full of mock awards and predictions. The prestigious Newbery and Caldecott awards are the most famous awards handed out during this ceremony, but a number of other awards are also handed out during this time. You can watch the recorded webcast of the whole event here. Janet Brooks emailed many of you the list of all the ALA Youth Media Award winners but you can also find it at www.ala.org/yma. 

When our Printz winner and honor books were announced, the crowd went wild. Librarians were standing, shouting, and cheering. Immediately after the announcement, I tweeted the picture above of all five of the Printz titles with their award seals. Within 24 hours of tweeting this photo, it was retweeted 803 times (including by John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Rainbow Rowell) with 1,864 people marking it as a favorite! The hashtag #ALAYMA became so popular that it became one of Twitter's top 10 trending hastag within minutes! It was so rewarding to see so much enthusiasm and support for young adult lit and for this award. 

One of the most memorable experiences of the weekend was calling the winners on Sunday morning. There were lots of tears, stunned silence, yelling, disbelief, and celebration from the publishers and authors, all of whom were sworn to secrecy until the official announcement on Monday. 

I’m very thankful to our library system for allowing me the opportunity to serve on this remarkable committee. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and one of the highlights of my professional career. Thank you, Larinda and Shren, for handling the delivery of all the boxes and packages from publishers. I’m also immensely grateful to the rest of the Outreach staff, who made room in our office for all of these books.