The Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award (RCYRBA) is an annual award given to the author of the book voted most outstanding by students in grades four through eight in participating Illinois schools and libraries. It is named in honor of children's author Rebecca Caudill, who lived and worked in Urbana, Illinois, and has been presented annually since 1988. It is administered by a volunteer board of directors and presented in cooperation with the Illinois Association of Teachers of English, the Illinois Reading Council, and the Illinois School Library Media Association.
Lesléa Newman, born November 5, 1955 in Brooklyn, New York City, is an American author, editor, and feminist.
Maniac Magee is a novel written by American author Jerry Spinelli and published in 1990. Exploring themes of racism and inequality, it follows the story of an orphan boy looking for a home in the fictional town of Two Mills. Two Mills is harshly segregated between the East and West, blacks and whites. He becomes a local legend for feats of athleticism and helpfulness, and his ignorance of sharp racial boundaries in the town. It is popular in middle school curricula, and has been used in social studies on the premises of reaction to racial identity and reading. A TV movie was released on February 23, 2003.
Airborn is a 2004 young adult novel by Kenneth Oppel. The novel is set in an alternate history where the airplane has not been invented, and instead, airships are the primary form of air transportation. Additionally, the world contains fictional animal species such as flying creatures that live their entire lives in the sky. The book takes place aboard a transoceanic luxury passenger airship, the Aurora, and is told from the perspective of its cabin boy, Matt Cruse.
Edith Pattou is an American writer of fantasy fiction, including the novel East, an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults for 2004. She was born in Evanston, Illinois, and she graduated from the Francis W. Parker School, Scripps College, Claremont Graduate School and UCLA (M.L.I.S.). She is married to Charles Emery, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. They have one child, a daughter.
The Lightning Thief is a 2005 American-fantasy-adventure novel based on Greek mythology, the first young adult novel written by Rick Riordan in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. It won the Adult Library Services Association Best Books for Young Adults, among other awards. It was adapted into a film named Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief released in the United States on February 12, 2010. On May 14, 2020, Riordan announced that a live-action TV series for Disney+ would adapt the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, with the first season covering The Lightning Thief. The novel is followed by The Sea of Monsters and spawned two sequel series and the extended universe of the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles.
Jon J Muth is an American writer and illustrator of children's books as well as graphic novels and comic books.
Richard Russell Riordan Jr. is an American author. He is known for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, about a teenager named Percy Jackson who discovers he is a son of the Greek god Poseidon. Riordan's books have been translated into forty-two languages and sold more than thirty million copies in the US. 20th Century Fox adapted the first two books of his Percy Jackson series as part of a series of films. His books have spawned related media, such as graphic novels and short story collections.
The Wednesday Wars is a 2007 young adult historical fiction novel written by Gary D. Schmidt, the author of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. The novel is set in suburban Long Island during the 1967–68 school year. The Vietnam War is an important backdrop for the novel. It was given a Newbery Honor medal in 2008, and was also nominated for the Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award in 2010.
Albert Watkins Key, Jr., publishing under the name Watt Key and Albert Key, is an American fiction author who is known for writing young-adult survival fiction. A resident of Alabama, his debut novel Alabama Moon was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006 and was the 2007 winner of the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for older readers. It received a 2006 Parents' Choice Award. Alabama Moon has been translated and published in eight languages. In 2015 Alabama Moon was listed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 100 young-adult books of all time.
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer and a subject of the Hispanic Monarchy from 1518. He is best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage bearing thereafter his name and achieved the first European navigation from the Atlantic to Asia. While on this voyage, Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in 1521 in the present-day Philippines, but some of the expedition's surviving members, in one of the two remaining ships, subsequently completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth when they returned to Spain in 1522.
Rebecca Caudill Ayars was an American author of children's literature with more than twenty books published. Her Tree of Freedom was a Newbery Honor Book in 1950. A Pocketful of Cricket, illustrated by Evaline Ness, was a Caldecott Honor Book.
Laurence Bergreen is an American historian and author.
Waiting for Normal is a young adult novel by Leslie Connor, published by Katherine Tegen Books on March 17, 2009.
Lockwood & Co. is a young adult supernatural thriller series written by Jonathan Stroud. The series follows three young operatives of a psychic detection agency as they fight ghosts in London, England.
Dark Life is the first book in a futuristic adventure fiction and science fiction series of the same name by Kat Falls. The novel was published May 1, 2010 by Scholastic. Falls has written a sequel: Rip Tide. Scholastic has published a study guide for the books.
Gabi Swiatkowska is a Polish-born artist, musician, and children's author and illustrator. She has shown up twice on the ALA Notable Book Award list. One of the books that she illustrated, My Name Is Yoon, won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and is on the New York Public Library's list of 100 Great Children's Books
Yolonda's Genius is a Newbery Honor book written by Carol Fenner and published in 1995. It was also a Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award Nominee in 1998.
A Friendship for Today is a 2007 book by Patricia McKissack about the life of a girl, Rosemary Patterson, attending one of the first integrated Missouri schools during the 1950s.
Kekla Magoon is an American author, best known for her NAACP Image Award-nominated young adult novel The Rock and the River, How It Went Down, The Season of Styx Malone, and X. In 2021, she received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her body of work. Her works also include middle grade novels, short stories, and historical, socio-political, and economy-related non-fiction.
