The American Library Association announced the winners of various book prizes, including the well-know Caldecott and Newbery Awards at their Mid-Winter meeting in San Antonio yesterday. See this Publisher's Weekly piece for details and this piece from the One-Minute Book Reviews Blog in which reviewer/blogger Janice Harayda points out that Flotsam by David Wiesner, which won the Caldecott Award for best illustrated children's book, has New Jersey connections. Wiesner clearly recalls his youthful vacations "down the shore" at Long Beach Island in this wordless picture book.
This led me to thinking yet again about why there is no central place(that I can find) which keeps track of New Jersey authors and literary connections. Some authors are listed at the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. A glossy flyer for the newly reestablished New Jersey Center for the Book got my hopes up, but, noble a cause as it may be, the website does not yet seem to make any mention of New Jersey authors as a group. I thought maybe Rutgers libraries or Rutgers Press might pull all that information together as they have done so beautifully for North Carolina authors on the UNC Chapel Hill library website (part of the North Carolina Collection at the Wilson Library.)
If you put the search terms "New Jersey authors" into the google search box at the top of this blog, the posts on this subject will pop up.
Thanks, Anne! Yesterday's (Tuesday's) Star-Ledger had a lovely article on page 2 about David Wiesner. In this article, Wiesner talks about how his summers on Long Beach Island influenced "Flotsam." (Don't miss the "LBI" beach tag in one of the illustrations in the book!) The S-L article may especially interest any BHPL cardholders who went to Bridgewater Raritan High (it quotes one of Wiesner's teachers there).
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