Some 1,100 guests reveled last night at the annual Newbery-Caldecott Banquet at the Washington Hilton. The revelry was about books, specifically this year's winners of the coveted Caldecott and Newbery Medals, Jerry Pinkney and Rebecca Stead.
What makes the banquet special is the opportunity for fans–among them members of the award selection committees and the editors and publishers who make the books happen–to hear the acceptance speeches of the accomplished illustrator and author who won the prizes, which were announced January 18.
Their speeches were also distributed to the crowd as table favors, along with an exquisite program that contained illustrations from Pinckney's Caldecott winner, The Lion and the Mouse. The artist told of the rapture he felt when the phone rang at 6:20 a.m. with the comittee on the other end telling him he'd won. It was the "number-one ah-ha moment" of his career, he said.
Rebecca Stead talked about how her Newbery-winning book, When You Reach Me, came to be. "By the age of 9," she said, "I knew I wanted to write." Stead observed that "librarians are the smartest, funniest, most open-minded people I have ever met."