So the Golden Kite is the award – there are four Golden Kites, four honor books and one award that’s named after Sid Fleischman which is given at the same time for humor and as far as I know, it’s the only award of its kind for excellence in children’s literature that’s judged by a jury of your peers. So it’s a slightly different criteria.
You know, the Newbery and the Caldecott and the Sibert, all of those are judged primarily by librarians. Librarians are amazing. They are the gatekeepers to our literary culture for kids so their choices are unbelievable. When you’re judged by a jury of your peers, I think this criteria are slightly different.
I think the librarians have a responsibility to look at that. This is more on the guts of the writing and on the originality of the idea so that we’re all aware of the history of children’s books so these can be either form busting or fresh. The book that won the Golden Kite for fiction this year by Deborah Wiles is called Revolution and it’s a new form. She calls it a documentary novel.
So it’s about Freedom Summer, the summer of 1964 but it uses not only narrative but it uses menus from the time and letters and slogans and photographs so I think that it got a lot of respect not only for the character of its writing and the content and the ideas but also because it’s someone clearly experimenting with a new form, with trying to kind of bust the fourth wall of what is a traditional book.
So I think the criteria are slightly different and I think the emphasis is a little bit more on courage, guts, you know, breaking out of something that’s been done before because that’s what writers, you know, we’re all seeking originality.
