2018 Award Winners

2016 Award Winners

Literacy & Social Responsibility Book Award 2017

**************************************************************************************************

Fiction Picturebook:

Splashdance by Liz Starin (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Ursula, a bear, and Ricardo, a human, are preparing for the water ballet competition, where the prize is a million dollars! But a new regulation at the community pool--no bears--leaves Ursula cut from the contest. Luckily, she encounters a group of undaunted animal swimmers at a local pond, and Ursula and her new team figure out a way to participate in the competition and make sure everyone is welcome at the pool once and for all. Filled with deadpan humor, adorable animals, and big themes about social justice and inclusion, Liz Starin's picture book Splashdance is a fun and splashy summer story with a lot of heart.

**************************************************************************************************

Fiction Novel:

Book Uncle and Me by Uma Krishnaswami (Groundwood Books)

Every day, nine-year-old Yasmin borrows a book from Book Uncle, a retired teacher who has set up a free lending library next to her apartment building. But when the mayor tries to shut down the rickety bookstand, Yasmin has to take her nose out of her book and do something.

**************************************************************************************************

Nonfiction Picturebook:

Growing Peace: A Story of Farming, Music, and Religious Harmony written and photographed by Richard Sobol (Lee & Low Books Inc.)
(Teacher Guide available)

On the morning of September 11, 2001, J. J. Keki, a Ugandan musician and coffee farmer, was in New York, about to visit the World Trade Center. Instead, J.J. witnessed the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. He came away from this event with strong emotions about religious conflict. Why should people be enemies because of their religions?

Back home in his village, J.J. was determined to find a way for people who held different religious beliefs to work together. He saw that the neighborhood children, from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families, played with one another without a care about religion. Why not enlist their parents, all coffee farmers like himself, in a cooperative venture around a shared goal? Together they would grow, harvest, and sell their coffee. At the same time, they would bridge religious differences to work and live together peacefully.

This photo-essay is a rare and timely story of hope, economic cooperation, and religious harmony from an often struggling part of the world. From J.J.’s vision, his community has achieved what many people strive for: a growing peace.

**************************************************************************************************

Nonfiction:

Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights by Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace (Calkins Creek)

Jonathan Daniels, a white seminary student from New Hampshire, traveled to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to help with voter registration of black residents. After the voting rights marches, he remained in Alabama, in the area known as Bloody Lowndes, an extremely dangerous area for white freedom fighters, to assist civil rights workers. Five months later, Jonathan Daniels was shot and killed while saving the life of Ruby Sales, a black teenager. Through Daniels’s poignant letters, papers, photographs, and taped interviews, authors Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace explore what led Daniels to the moment of his death, the trial of his murderer, and how these events helped reshape both the legal and political climate of Lowndes County and the nation.