From: Kathleen Horning <horning_at_education.wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2012 10:28:48 -0500

I am forwarding this message at the request of Marc Aronson:

** This question touches a nerve for me. Along with Michael Cart, I worked to create the award (I can't recall if he or I or someone else thought up the name, in honor of a person we both knew and admired); I served on the committee that crafted the rules and another that reviewed how the award was going. We made it explicitly clear that the prize honored literary excellence in many genres, and yet, in the main, this has become a fiction prize. The rules specifically state that anthologies (never selected), nonfiction (rarely selected), poetry (never), even -- I believe-- plays (never) were eligible. Yet what we have had is so much a prize for novels and in particular fantasy that some assume that the Printz is meant to be a fiction prize. I hope that future committees will be as alert to the excellences available in all forms of YA literature as we intended.

Marc Aronson Sent from my iPad

-- Kathleen T. Horning Director Cooperative Children's Book Center 4290 Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park Street Madison, WI 53706 Tel: 608-263-3721 Fax: 608-262-4933 horning_at_education.wisc.edu http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/
Received on Mon 06 Aug 2012 10:28:48 AM CDT