This year's Ezra Jack Keats Book Awards for new writer and illustrator go to Laurel Croza for her debut picture book, I Know Here (Groundwood Books, 2010), which captures a child's fear of moving to a big city, and Tao Nyeu for her pastel colored silk-screen images in Bunny Days (Dial, 2010).
The bear from Nyeu's Wonder Bear (Dial, 2008) returns in three stories in Bunny Days, an eye-catching picture book full of funny details and illustrations that are reminiscent of those found in Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon (Harper & Row, 1955). The three stories—"Muddy Bunnies," "Dusty Bunnies," and "Bunny Tails"—are about bunnies that are put into a washing machine after accidentally getting muddied, a goat and bear who find bunnies in the goat's ill-working vacuum cleaner, and a bear that reattaches tails onto bunnies after a funny pruning mishap.
Ezra Jack Keats Book Awards selection committee members stand with the winners left to right: Elizabeth Bird, Barbara Genco, Pat Cummings, Deborah Pope, Dr. Karen Patricia Smith, Lisa Von Drasek, Laurel Croza, Tao Nyeu, Nina Crews, Miriam Lang Budin, Marisabina Russo, Julia Chang.
Croza's I Know Here is based on the author's childhood memories of leaving rural Saskatchewan for the big city Toronto. She thinks about what she's seen in her small town and mentally prepares for the move. "This is what I know. Here," she says.
Nyeu and Croza received their awards during a ceremony at the New York Public Library on Tuesday night to celebrate excellence in children's literature by new authors and illustrators. The winners received a bronze medallion and a $1,000 cash prize.
The awards are named for Keats, who illustrated more than 85 children's books and wrote the stories in 24 of them. Keats won the 1963 Caldecott Award for his book The Snowy Day (Viking, 1962) and is known for introducing multiculturalism into mainstream American children's literature through the use of Puerto Rican and black characters and by using urban city settings to tell his stories.
Tao Nyeu signs a book for a fan.
The Ezra Jack Keats Book Awards were established in 1985 and are presented jointly by the New York Public Library and the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation to talented new children's book authors and illustrators who, in the spirit of Keats, create vividly written and illustrated children's books for kids ages nine and under.
A selection committee of early childhood education specialists, librarians, illustrators, and experts in children's literature select the books. To be eligible, writers and illustrators must have published no more than three books.
This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe.
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