A Long-Awaited Reunion at ALA's Newbery/Caldecott Banquet
RSSBy Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 08/12/2009
Susan Erickson, a librarian and 2009 Caldecott committee member, pulled a few strings at last month’s Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder Banquet in Chicago to sit next to one of her favorite people: Francisco Jiménez.
And it turned out to be a long-awaited reunion.
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Jiménez and Erickson at ALA's Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet in July. |
But the more Erickson thought about the book, the more familiar the names and places sounded. So she went to her garage and pulled out her high school yearbook—and there Jiménez was, only with a different first name.
“I found his picture, and realized he’d gone by Frank Jiménez,” says Erickson, the youth services coordinator for the San Bernardino County Library System and a Beatty Award committee member at the time. “And then I realized I remembered him because he’d been our student body president.”
Jiménez’s novel, of leaving Mexico at the age of four and growing up in migrant workers camp in Santa Maria, CA, went on to win the Beatty Award, which honors a children or young adult book that best promotes an awareness of the state and its people.
While the two stayed in touch, with Erickson encouraging Jiménez to continue writing about his life, and Jiménez acknowledging her in his last two books Breaking Through (2001) and Reaching Out (2008, both Houghton), they rarely see each other in person.
Fast forward to last month.
As Erickson was preparing to attend the American Library Association’s Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet, it dawned on her that the publisher of this year’s Caldecott winner, The House in the Night, was Houghton Mifflin—the same publisher as Jiménez’s work. And a quick call, and a promise of a secret, made a reunion possible.
At lunchtime on the day of the banquet, Jiménez was honored for winning the Pura Belpré for Reaching Out—and he couldn’t understand why everyone was teasing him.
“They kept asking me if I knew about the surprise,” says Jiménez. “And I’m asking, ‘What surprise?’”
But once he and his wife Laura saw Erickson seated at their table, they finally understood. “It was an honor,” he says.
Erickson says the honor is hers. She encouraged Jiménez to write his second and third story, and now he’s embarking on his fourth, which will follow his years in graduate school at New York’s Columbia University.
“I call her my literary guardian angel,” says Jiménez, a professor at California’s Santa Clara University.
Jiménez’s story is one Erickson knows has enthralled and moved children of all ages, and hopes it continues to—as it did her when she first read The Circuit and found his picture in her garage more than a decade ago.
“None of us knew his circumstances while at school,” she says. “It was just stunning. But of course I was just a lowly freshman, and I didn’t know these popular seniors like him.”
Twelve years ago, Erickson read The Circuit (University of New Mexico Press, 1997) by Jiménez, and she thought it would be a great entry for that year’s California Library Association’s Beatty Award.
