Back in 1996, Laura Amy Schlitz wrote a story about the Middle Ages. This year, it won the Newbery.

The kids in Sharen Pula’s fifth-grade class are getting ready to go on a journey. One boy kicks off his shoes to get comfy. Another lies on his side, head on hand. A girl loosens her ponytail before leaning against the library wall. Like a force of nature, Laura Amy Schlitz bustles into the room and promptly sits on the floor in front of them, tucking her long black skirt under her. Schlitz, the winner of this year’s Newbery Medal, may be on a pedestal in the world of children’s books, but here at Baltimore’s Park School (a private, preK–12 school) she seems right at home sitting at the feet of these kids. “Hello, my pets,” says the media specialist and in-house storyteller extraordinaire, barely raising her voice. “This is a tall tale about our friends the Mongols. It’s called 'Gulnara the Tartar Warrior.’” So commences a yarn that encompasses burning villages, bared breasts, poisonous snakes, and a warrior maiden with a powerful secret—the sort of stuff that kids eat up. Like Schlitz’s award-winning book, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (Candlewick, 2007), the tale takes place in the Middle Ages. And like Gulnara, the 23 characters that populate the pages of Good Masters! sprang to life to help kids grasp the ethos of an age when being a child was a dangerous business. Schlitz, who oversees the second- through fifth-grade section of a newly renovated library with 70,000 titles, initially wrote Good Masters! 12 years ago as a series of monologues for Pula’s former fifth graders to perform. Since then, the story has become ingrained in the school’s curriculum. “The monologues are so rich and deep and meaningful,” says Pula, who calls Schlitz one of her “dearest friends.” Early in the school year, Pula’s students chose characters from the book to study and then collect artifacts and build museums representing their character’s life. To the 52-year-old Schlitz, a natural storyteller who has been writing most of her adulthood, winning the highest honor in children’s literature seems a bit like a tall tale itself. But then again, Schlitz has long had a thing for the dramatic. At 13, she began working onstage at a dinner theater near her family’s Baltimore home—that “wonderful experience,” Schlitz says, spurred a lifelong love of the theater. After graduating in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in aesthetics from Goucher College in Baltimore, she applied for a position as a performer, or “traveling troubadour,” at the city’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. It turned out Schlitz wasn’t eligible for the position, part of a Carter–era jobs program, because she hadn’t been unemployed the requisite 15 weeks. But Pratt’s librarians liked her and offered her another job, as a children’s librarian, a position Schlitz held until the mid-eighties. She then spent two years touring and writing plays for the Children’s Theatre Association of Baltimore, Maryland’s oldest theater company for kids, before joining Park School in 1991. Two years later, Schlitz published her first novel, an adult romance called A Gypsy at Almack’s (St. Martin’s), under the pseudonym Chloe Cheshire. When a second book, a historical novel, failed to find a buyer, Schlitz packed it up—along with most of her hopes of becoming an established author—in a box in her basement, where it “lives in a beautiful cookie tin with a print of a medieval town, like a little reliquary.” Despite the setback, Schlitz kept writing. To date, she has written more than a dozen plays, many of them performed by Baltimore companies. Still, there was nothing like the acclaim that started on January 14 with the announcement of the Newbery Medal winner. “I still can’t believe my book is on the same poster with books by Kate DiCamillo, Hugh Lofting, Madeleine L’Engle…” says Schlitz, referring to a recent American Library Association poster. “I’ve been invited to sit at the table with the gods. I think it’s a fake invitation, but I’m still going to sit.” It’s hard to imagine Schlitz sitting anywhere for very long. In the seven years since Danielle Sadler, an assistant at Candlewick, snatched Good Masters! out of the slush pile, the Somerville, MA, publisher has put out four of Schlitz’s books—including The Hero Schliemann (2006), a nonfiction book that grew out of one of Schlitz’s student stories; A Drowned Maiden’s Hair (2006), a novel about a headstrong orphan who’s adopted by a trio of spinster psychics; and The Bearskinner (2007), a tweaking of the classic Brothers Grimm tale. In addition, Schlitz has continued to share at least four new stories a week with her 23 classes. In between, she repairs books, helps students with research, and answers the sudden onslaught of media inquiries. And, oh yes, on Saturdays, she writes. “It’s a rare school day that I come home and write,” she says, twirling a few strands of her waist-length, silver hair in her fingers. “But I’m pretty good at working on Saturdays. One thing I can’t do is lose the story I’m working on.” Schlitz, who is single, rounds out her busy work life by dabbling in thoughtful hobbies like playing the folk harp, making marionettes, playing bridge, sewing quilts, folding origami animals, and “a little gardening of the not-very-serious kind.” By the time Candlewick took a chance on Good Masters!, 10 publishers had rejected it. Schlitz’s editor, Mary Lee Donovan, admits the manuscript was initially a “difficult sell.” The trick, she says, was getting a broad audience to see the story as more than simply an enchanting script for a drama department or—because of its witty footnotes—a helpful educational guide for a unit on the Middle Ages. “I kind of scratched my head for a long time, says Donovan. “Laura was losing heart. I kept thinking, 'How can I sell this—not just to the greater public—but how can I sell this to people in my company?’” Donovan eventually asked Schlitz to strengthen the links between the young characters and give them more crushes, vendettas, or conspiracies for the careful reader to detect. So Schlitz, who had already built a few connections into the piece, revisited the monologues. Rather than force the bonds between the existing characters, Schlitz—to her editor’s great surprise—invented several new ones whose stories interlocked with some of the others’ in the book. Finally, after several false starts working with children’s book illustrators, Candlewick approached Robert Byrd, whose images immediately widened the story’s consumer appeal. Donovan allowed Schlitz to weigh in on many of the lively pen-and-ink drawings (a rare privilege for a kids’ book writer) and decided to keep the footnotes, which is virtually unheard of in children’s literature. In the end, Donovan says, it was the promise of keeping Schlitz happy that pushed the book through. “It came to be less about this book and more about this author… and all that she had to offer.” Reviews of “Good Masters!” have applauded Schlitz’s research and her gift for drawing young readers in with the pungent details of life in the Middle Ages. “Schlitz is a talented storyteller,” wrote a New York Times reviewer last December. “Her language is forceful, and learning slips in on the sly.” Schlitz says the library where she works—with its wide windows overlooking a small lake—is an inspiration for that sly kind of integrated teaching, as are the children who pass through it each day. Readers of Good Masters!, for example, learn about tanning hides from Drogo, a young apprentice who doesn’t “mind the stink” of his job, which entails “grinding the oak bark, smearing the hides with dung.” And they learn about home cures in a verse from Thomas, the doctor’s son: “My father is the noble lord’s physician, And I am bound to carry on tradition. With every patient that my father cures, I learn more medicine. Ordinary sores Will heal with comfrey, or the white of an egg. An eel skin takes the cramping from a leg.” Members of the Newbery committee found the monologues so irresistible they each agreed to take on a role and perform it together later this year. “It really begs to be heard,” says committee member Carol Edwards, who is children’s services manager at the Denver Public Library. “We talked about the language choice—and we’ve since decided we’re all going to memorize and share this with each other so we can hear it as a performance piece.” Even before the group made its final selection, Edwards says, there was great affection for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! “There was a lovefest,” she says. “Every person on the committee felt that it was really one of the most wonderful books of the year.” Schlitz seems to be adapting well to the love. In January, shortly after the Newbery announcement, Park School held an assembly at which its more than 800 students gave their media specialist a five-minute standing ovation. Just this late-winter morning, the framed cover of her award-winning book—complete with its gold foil medallion—was affixed to the library’s entryway. Nearby, a wooden carousel of Newbery winners displays several copies of her book. And Schlitz only pauses a moment when an eight-year-old with glasses and tousled blonde hair swoops down on one knee and holds up a copy of Good Masters! for her to sign. “Oh, Ian, I’d be happy to sign this later, when I can write something nice in it just for you,” she says, giving the boy a quick hug and scooting him out the door of her office. Schlitz is the second consecutive librarian to win the coveted Newbery Medal. Within months of winning the award for The Higher Power of Lucky (S & S/Richard Jackson Bks., 2006), children’s librarian Susan Patron quit her day job at the Los Angeles Public Library to write full time. Schlitz, on the other hand, plans to continue working at the school. “This is such a rewarding place to tell stories, because the children are such amazing listeners,” she says. “They teach me so much—where they laugh, what’s suspenseful. And as people, on the whole, they have a lot of fundamental decency about them.” Back at storytime with Pula’s fifth graders, Schlitz pats the floor with her outstretched hands, mimicking the hooves of a “skewbald mare” flying across the Mongol sands. Then suddenly, Schlitz’s arms begin to flap like the wings that Gulnara sprouts as she flies across the sky to save her family and her people. The children sitting in front of Schlitz emit a collective gasp as Gulnara magically captures the Khan and narrowly escapes being eaten by snakes. For the last 20 minutes, they’ve been immersed in the presence of a mystery; drawn into a web woven for them by a master storyteller whose love and respect for children are capable of making them soar over vast deserts and walk with medieval scoundrels. Schlitz claps her hands and pops up to her feet again, shaking the students from her spell. “My pets, go read!” she commands. And off they go, eager to explore the library’s other treasures.

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Freelance writer Mary Grace Gallagher lives in Annapolis, MD.