On October 19, 2007, the 2007 Jane
Addams Children's Book
Awards
were presented by the Jane Addams Peace Association.
The
following transcript is the opening remarks at the
presentation of the awards:
The
Opening Remarks by Susan C. Griffith
Thank you, Ann, and thanks to the Jane Addams Peace Association
and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
for sponsoring these awards that, for the 54th year, honor Jane
Addams – her principles, her philosophy, and her activism.
As Chair of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Committee,
I would like to acknowledge Erika Schlenkermann for her music, the
special efforts of the JAPA Board in providing books for purchase
and signing, and all the members of the award committee. Here
today are Eliza Dresang, a member of the committee since the year
2000, and a new member of the Committee, Sonja Cherry-Paul, who
will join our work in 2008. Other members, spread across the country,
are listed on your program and are here in spirit.
I welcome all of you gathered in this room. You come from California,
Florida, Texas, New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania to honor the legacy of Jane Addams, the power of stories,
and the future of all children. What brings us to this moment? The
journey for all of us begins long before we took a step outside our
doors today. It began with imagination—maybe ten years
ago, maybe just two or three, an idea or image surfaced in the minds
of the authors and illustrators we see before us. They paid attention,
made a commitment, nurtured the ideas and brought them to friends,
colleagues, publishers and editors who listened, supported, reflected
and gave time and resources to bring those ideas forward to create
the books we honor today.
And where will this moment take us? For us, the readers of your
stories, it will take us back to our own homes and communities. There,
we act as part of a social justice network committed to the power of
imagination and stories in shaping a world grounded in peace, social
justice and world community. In doing so, we take inspiration
from Jane Addams herself who, in 1902, wrote:
We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility
and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents
a realization of the experiences of other people (Addams, Democracy
and Social Ethics, p. 8).
We use our own imaginations to create the events, exhibits,
conversations, reviews, activities and celebrations that draw attention
to these stories and place them in the hands of children who have imaginations
of their own. Our network grows stronger with each passing year. Here
are highlights of this year’s efforts:
- For the first time ever, the Jane Addams Children’s Book
Award winners and honor books were announced from the Jane
Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois-Chicago in April.
In cooperation with Lisa Lee, Director of the Museum, this now
annual press conference was held in the Residents’ Dining
Room—the wood-paneled, high-ceilinged room where Addams
herself ate, discussed, plotted and planned to change the world
with the cadre of woman who lived and worked alongside her.
- Accompanied by Jane Addams, the Time Traveler, (who is here with
us today), Addams Committee member Jo Montie worked with children
in Minnesota schools. She used the books, the Addams doll and
an empathy game to encourage children to make connections with Addams
and to ask themselves: How might I make choices to make a difference
while I’m here?
- As a direct result of attending last year’s ceremony, Michelle
Yang and Sonja Cherry-Paul of the Hastings-on-the-Hudson School District
founded the Jane Addams Literature Circle for Girls. They organized
and now lead a group of girls who meet once a month to discuss an
Addams Award winner or honor book. The girls, many of whom
are here with us today, tell what the group means to them in a handout
in your folder.
- Pat Wiser, our indefatigable member from Sewanee, Tennessee, continued
her work in Appalachia where she carefully and cautiously integrates
the Addams books into the curricula of local schools and drives into
the mountains to conduct story hours that push school children to
realize the experiences of others.
- And, members of the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom staged an impressive multi-faceted celebration of the
2007 Winners and Honor books at San Francisco Public Library. See
the San Francisco Public Library Website to catch the excitement
of children enjoying Addams books on their own and in organized
activities and to see photographs of the exhibit of 54 years of Addams
Award winners that anchored the celebration.
And, now, back to this moment. We want you, the writers and
artists whose imaginations have led us here, to know: When you put
fingers to the keyboard or a brush or pencil to paper, we are waiting
for your work in California, Tennessee, Minnesota, New York and beyond. We
are out there, building a network ready to receive the works of your
imaginations. We believe, as Beth McGowan, representative of WILPF,
said at the 2007 Award Announcement at Hull-House:
In giving this Award, the Jane Addams Peace Association acknowledges
that
the work of our minds shapes the world in which we live. The association
acknowledges that the remaking of the world must begin with the remaking
of the stories we tell our children.
Remarks by Susan C. Griffith
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
A Place Where Sunflowers Grow, written
by Amy Lee-Tai, illustrated by Felicia Hoshino and published by Children’s
Book Press, is the winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award
for Younger Children. Set in a U.S. internment camp and told in both
Japanese and English, this is the story of preschooler Mari and her
family. Subdued by her losses and frightened by living under guard in
the harsh desert, Mari barely talks or laughs anymore.
Mari’s parents look to creative expression to urge her fears into
the open and to rekindle her spirit. Her mother plants sunflower seeds
with her; her father brings her to art classes held in the barracks.
At first, Mari is unable to draw and the sunflower seeds refuse to sprout. But
then, lavished with the time, patience and care of her parents and teacher,
Mari does begin to draw, and, in words from the text: “It was if,
with every drawing she created, Mari found another question to ask and
the courage to ask it.” “Why are we in camp? Why
is almost everyone here Japanese American? Will I ever see my old
friends again?”
Finally, after three long months, on the day she draws the crowded family
barracks with imagined sunflowers so tall they rival the guard towers
above them, the sunflowers sprout.
A Place Where Sunflowers Grow blends understatement
with telling details in language carefully chosen to appeal to young
children. Mixed-media illustrations in the browns, yellows, golds and
greens of both sunflowers and the desert foreground the tenderness of
conversations between Mari and her parents against the grim background
of the armed guards and barbed wire that enclose them. Writer Amy
Lee-Tai and illustrator Felicia Hoshino drew inspiration from the stories
and art of Amy Lee-Tai’s grandmother Ibuki Hibi Lee to create a
book that demonstrates that, with time, patience, care and the arts,
human dignity and human compassion can be nurtured in even the most unjust
circumstances.
It is with great pleasure that we present the Jane Addams Children’s
Book Award in the Younger Children’s category to author Amy Lee-Tai.
It is with great pleasure that we present the Jane Addams Children’s
Book Award to illustrator Felicia Hoshino.
Remarks by Susan C. Griffith
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata,
published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing, is the winner of the Jane Addams Children’s
Book Award in the Books for Older Children category.
It’s early December 1941. Twelve-year-old Sumiko rushes
home to her hardworking family’s flower farm waving a prized invitation
to a classmate’s birthday party. In painful foreshadowing of the
heartbreak and injustice all Japanese Americans will soon face, Sumiko
is turned away from the party.
Thrown off balance early in life by the death of her parents, Sumiko
and her little brother are now firmly rooted in the family of their Uncle,
Auntie, grandfather and older cousins. Life revolves around the
routines of the flower farm and the family rituals that nurture growth
in everyday life. All is lost when the United States declares war
on Japan: The government arrests Grandfather and Uncle and ships
Auntie, the cousins, Sumiko and her brother to Poston, an internment
camp on the Mohave Indian reservation.
At Poston, like thousands of others in the camp, Sumiko faces dust,
heat, confinement and boredom. Adrift, she draws on memories of her grandfather’s
stories to spur her to purposeful action. She irrigates and cultivates
a plot of ground, plants seeds that she has carried from home, and grows
weedflowers, the common stock-flower she loves so dearly. Grown-ups
are worried about the loss of discipline among the children. But when
the adults talk about her, they just joke, “All Sumiko cares about
is dirt.”
But Sumiko’s life is more than what the grown-ups observe. In
a chance encounter outside the confines of the camp, she meets Frank,
a Mohave boy. In secret, Sumiko and Frank form a friendship—one
that Sumiko must nurture as carefully as her flowers, one that pushes
her to new understandings of herself and of a world that seems not to
care about her or her dreams.
In creating a story of the Japanese Internment through Sumiko’s
eyes, Cynthia Kadohata blends fact and fiction to create a novel that
portrays the cruel loss of the purposeful and productive lives of Japanese-American
citizens and the Mohave people. The author’s thorough research
and empathetic imagination give life to Sumiko, herself a weedflower
whose beauty springs from her hardy and artful survival in an environment
designed to destroy it. She proves that in the human spirit, as in nature,
nothing and no one is a weed.
The Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Committee
is honored to present the Award to the winner in the Books for Older
Children category, Cynthia Kadohata. Congratulations.
Two books won honors in the Books for Younger Children
Category.
Remarks by Eliza T. Dresang
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
We are bound for the Promise Land!
Oh, who will come and go with me?
We will come and go with you
We are bound for the Promised Land!
This refrain resounds throughout the 2007 Jane Addams Children’s
Book Award Honor Book, Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship & Freedom,
told in written form by nationally recognized Choctaw storyteller, Tim
Tingle, illustrated by Jeanne Rorex Bridges, an award-winning artist,
and published by Cinco Puntos press.
This traditional Choctaw story starts when Martha Tom, a young Indian
girl, crosses the River Bok Chitto the boundary between free and slave
territory in search of blackberries for her mother’s wedding preparations
and witnesses the singing of this refrain in a forbidden slave gathering,
deep in the Mississippi woods. The refrain rings in Martha’s mind
as she steals back across the river many times, using stones hidden beneath
the water but seeming to walk on the surface. Over time she becomes a
close friend of Little Mo, a black boy her age, whose father leads these
welcoming but forbidden worship services.
But the night that Little Mo learns his mother has been sold and enlists
Martha and the other Indian women’s help miraculously to lead his
seven-member family to safety and freedom on the Choctaw side of Bok
Chitto, the very immediate and concrete meaning of the Promised Land
becomes clear. Martha’s singing of the refrain in Choctaw
as the family crosses Bok Chitto symbolizes the friendship of the two
peoples and how they worked together courageously and non-violently to
break a cycle of fear and subjugation.
The lyrical language of the storytelling, the solemn dignity of each
individual portrayed in the perfectly-matched compelling acrylic paintings,
and the final historical notes and explanation of the tale’s origins
in Choctaw culture come together in a uniquely outstanding picture book.
The Jane Addams Committee is pleased to honor this story of friendship
and freedom that can be found nowhere else in the annals of children’s
literature and yet records an extremely important partnership between
the native peoples and enslaved Africans in their struggle for freedom.
Congratulations and thank you to Tim Tingle, Jeanne Rorex Bridges, and
Cinco Puntos for bringing to the children of the world this example of
a little known but highly significant part of American history authentically
told from the oral tradition.
Remarks by Susan C. Griffith
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
Night Boat to Freedom, written by Margot
Theis Raven with pictures by E. B. Lewis, published by Melanie Kroupa
Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux is a compelling work of
historical fiction rich with the tones of oral storytelling. Christmas
John, an enslaved African-American boy, repeatedly faces danger and darkness
to row other slaves across the Ohio River to freedom. With Granny Judith’s
story of her own cruel capture fueling his actions, Christmas John faces
his fear with her words to guide him: “What scares the head
is best done with the heart.”
Expressive watercolors in blues and grays create passionate conversations
held in shadowy firelight and intense moonless nights filled with silence
and risk. Red, subdued when it represents the sorrow and blood
of slavery, becomes a bright motif of triumph when it stands alongside
all the colors Granny Judith sews into a freedom quilt. Drawing key elements
from African-American slave narratives, Night Boat to Freedom offers
an inspiring story that is exactly as Ms. Raven describes it in her Author’s
Note: “patches of truth stitched together by voices alive
with history.”
For Night Boat to Freedom, a story that shows the resilience and courage
of a child faced with injustice, I am pleased to present this 2007 Jane
Addams Children’s Book Award honor citation for a Book for Younger
Children to Melanie Kroupa on behalf of author Margot Theis Raven.
In recognition of evocative, moving illustrations, I am pleased to present
a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Honor Citation in the Books
for Younger Children Category to E. B. Lewis. Melanie Kroupa will
accept the citation.
Two books won honors in the Books for Older Children
category.
Remarks by Eliza T. Dresang
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
Russell Freedman, author of the 2007 Jane Addams Children’s Book
Award Honor book, Freedom Walkers, published by Holiday House, is a well-known
name in the arena of children’s literature; his work has received
virtually every major award given to writing for young people. And
yet he continues, as he does in Freedom Walkers, to tackle important
historical and social topics in compelling ways so that they capture
the attention of youth and surely inspire them, as did Jane Addams
herself, to make the world a place more amenable to peace and social
justice.
In Freedom Walkers, Freeman takes a novel approach to the story of the
1954 Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott that is often thought of as the event
of that spearheaded the Civil Rights movement. The quiet determination
of many individuals who fought their own battles against segregation,
paving the way for Rosa Parks’s determination not to give up her
seat on the bus to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus is clearly portrayed.
Whole chapters are devoted to such individuals, e.g., Jo Ann Robinson,
a recently hired professor of English, who, in 1949, was humiliated because
she happened to sit in what was determined the white portion of the bus
or teenager Claudette Colvin. Freeman expertly depicts the dignity and
intelligence with which Rosa Parks carried out her role as the catalyst
for the strike, and the subsequent coming together of the many, many
Freedom Walkers for the 382 days during which they walked to work – often
at great sacrifice – and brought the attention of the world
to Montgomery. In fact, they brought about the end of segregated transportation
forever. Russell Freeman makes these walkers vividly real with the use
of both known and unknown personal details and forceful descriptions.
The black and white photographs speak as articulately as the words
of the emotions of this event that taught people everywhere how disputes
could be settled peacefully when determination to do so is present and
how injustice can be confronted in nonviolent yet highly effective ways. The
Jane Addams Committee congratulations you, Mr. Freedman, for this engrossing
account of the Montgomery Freedom Walkers and for the clarity with which
you portray this example of how to approach problems of great magnitude
with courage and determination to solve them in a peaceable manner.
Remarks by Susan C. Griffith
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Ceremony
October 19, 2007
Counting on Grace, by Elizabeth
Winthrop, is published by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House
Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc. In a fit
of pique, schoolteacher Miss Lesley dismisses second-best reader Grace
Forcier from her mill-owned classroom. Her best reader, Arthur
Trottier, has just been conscripted to work in the mills in his dead
father’s stead. This novel is set in Vermont in the early
1900s, and is told through the voice of twelve-year-old French Canadian
Grace Forcier.
No longer a schoolgirl, Grace is eager to join her family in the mills. She
knows that, as a doffer changing bobbins on her mother’s six looms,
she will be counted on for the money she brings to her struggling family. But
exuberant Grace is not quick like her older sister Delia who, the morning
of Grace’s first day, issues her a stern, heartfelt warning: “Grace,
every second. Pay attention.” Grace’s mind wanders,
her body resists, and her spirits sag as the relentless pressure of factory
life bears down upon her.
In a story inspired by a photo taken by Lewis Hine, a reformer with
a camera, Elizabeth Winthrop gives us Grace—a girl who negotiates
the dangerous looms, empathizes with the striving of her friend Arthur,
and lovingly cares about and for her family members. Grace is a
courageous individual but she is not alone. When the letter she
secretly writes with Miss Lesley and Arthur brings Lewis Hine to town,
his careful activism and respectful approach ground her more firmly in
her community while stretching her sense of self beyond its boundaries.
This historical novel emphasizes the importance of literacy, imagination,
community and activism in challenging social injustice. I am pleased
to present a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award honor citation in
the category of Books for Older Children to Elizabeth Winthrop.
Since 1953, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award annually acknowledges
books published in the U.S. during the previous year. Books chosen effectively
address themes or topics that promote peace, justice, world community,
and/or equality of the sexes and all races. The books also must meet
conventional standards of literary and artistic excellence.
A national committee chooses winners and honor books for older and younger
children. Members of the 2007 Jane Addams Children's Book Awards
Committee are Susan C. Griffith, Chair (Mt. Pleasant, Michigan), Barbara
Bair (Washington, D. C.), Ann Bower (Harwich, Massachusetts), Eliza T.
Dresang (Tallahassee, Florida), Oralia Garza de Cortes (Pasadena, CA),
MJ Grande (Juneau, Alaska), Margaret Jensen (Madison, Wisconsin), Jo
Montie (Minneapolis, MN), Sarah Park (Long Beach, California) Deborah
Taylor (Baltimore, Maryland), and Pat Wiser (Sewanee, Tennessee). Regional
reading and discussion groups participated with many of the committee
members throughout the jury’s evaluation and selection process.
The 2007 Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards will be presented
Friday, October 19th in New York City. Details about the award
event and about securing winner and honor book seals are available from
the Jane Addams Peace Association. Contact JAPA Executive Director Linda
B. Belle, 777 United Nations Plaza, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017-3521;
by phone 212-682-8830; and by e-mail japa@igc.org.
For additional information about the Jane Addams Children’s Book
Awards and a complete list of books honored since 1953, see www.janeaddamspeace.org.
Founded in 1948, JAPA is the educational arm of the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In addition to sponsoring
the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards and many other educational
projects, JAPA houses the U.N. office of WILPF in New York City and owns
the Jane Addams House in Philadelphia where the U.S. section of WILPF
is located. Organized on April 28th in 1915, WILPF is celebrating its
92nd year. For information, visit www.wilpf.int.ch/.
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