The John Newbery Medal, frequently shortened to the Newbery, is a literary award given by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), to the author of "the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children". The Newbery and the Caldecott Medal are considered the two most prestigious awards for children's literature in the United States. Books selected are widely carried by bookstores and libraries, the authors are interviewed on television, and master's theses and doctoral dissertations are written on them. Named for John Newbery, an 18th-century English publisher of juvenile books, the winner of the Newbery is selected at the ALA's Midwinter Conference by a fifteen-person committee. The Newbery was proposed by Frederic G. Melcher in 1921, making it the first children's book award in the world. The physical bronze medal was designed by Rene Paul Chambellan and is given to the winning author at the next ALA annual conference. Since its founding there have been several changes to the composition of the selection committee, while the physical medal remains the same.
Laurence Michael Yep is an American writer. He is known for his children's books, having won the Newbery Honor twice for his Golden Mountain series. In 2005, he received the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his career contribution to American children's literature.
Katherine Alice Applegate, known professionally as K. A. Applegate or Katherine Applegate, is an American young adult and children's fiction writer, best known as the author of the Animorphs, Remnants, Everworld, and other book series. She won the 2013 Newbery Medal for her 2012 children's novel The One and Only Ivan. Applegate's most popular books are science fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels. She won the Best New Children's Book Series Award in 1997 in Publishers Weekly. Her book Home of the Brave has won several awards. She also wrote a chapter book series in 2008–09 called Roscoe Riley Rules.
Thích Quảng Đức was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who died by suicide by self-immolation at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11 June 1963. Quảng Đức was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists by the US-backed South Vietnamese government of Ngô Đình Diệm, a staunch Roman Catholic. Photographs of his self-immolation circulated around the world, drawing attention to the policies of the Diệm government. John F. Kennedy said of one photograph, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one." Malcolm Browne won the World Press Photo of the Year for his photograph of the monk's death.
Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese American author and journalist who has written about the Overseas Vietnamese experience.
Hội An, formerly known in English as Fai-Fo or Faifoo, is a city with a population of approximately 120,000 in Vietnam's Quảng Nam Province and has been noted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. Along with the Cù Lao Cham archipelago, it is part of the Cù Lao Cham-Hội An Biosphere Reserve, designated in 2009.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. She has written multiple books, and her first novel, The Book of Salt, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2003. It was a national bestseller, and was awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
Russell A. Freedman was an American biographer and the author of nearly 50 books for young people. He may be known best for winning the 1988 Newbery Medal with his work Lincoln: A Photobiography.
Walter Dean Myers was an American writer of children's books best known for young adult literature. He was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, but was raised in Harlem. A tough childhood led him to writing and his school teachers would encourage him in this habit as a way to express himself. He wrote more than one hundred books including picture books and nonfiction. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American authors five times. His 1988 novel Fallen Angels is one of the books most frequently challenged in the U.S. because of its adult language and its realistic depiction of the Vietnam War.
Marilyn Singer is an author of children's books in a wide variety of genres, including fiction and non-fiction picture books, juvenile novels and mysteries, young adult fantasies, and poetry.
Oliver Brendan Jeffers is an Australian-born Northern Irish artist, illustrator and writer who now lives and works in Brooklyn. He went to the integrated secondary school Hazelwood College, then graduated from the University of Ulster in 2001.
Dragon of the Lost Sea is a fantasy novel by American author Laurence Yep. It was first published in 1982 and is the first book in his Dragon series. Having already written several books, Yep had wanted to adapt Chinese mythology into a fantasy form for some time, and began writing the story in 1980 after undertaking careful research. He had originally intended to adapt a Chinese folktale in which the Monkey King captured a river spirit who had flooded an entire city, which he at first tried to conceive in picture book form.
Huỳnh Thúc Kháng, courtesy name Giới Sanh, pen name Mính Viên, also known as Cụ Huỳnh, was a Vietnamese anti-colonial activist, statesman and journalist, most notably serving as Acting President of Vietnam and President of the Annamese House of Representatives.
Kim Đồng Publishing House is the largest book producer and publisher for Vietnamese children. With more than a thousand titles of books published yearly, its books are offered to children of all ages, providing a wide range of collections and genres from literature, science, art, history to comics, pop-up and board books. The publisher was named after a young martyr Kim Đồng.
Quang Nhuong Huynh was a Vietnamese-born American author. He wrote two books, and has received several awards for his autobiographical work The Land I Lost. Huynh is credited as being the first Vietnamese author to write fiction and non-fiction in English.
Thanhha Lai is a Vietnamese-American writer of children's literature. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.
Inside Out & Back Again is a verse novel, written in free verse by Thanhha Lai. The book was awarded the 2011 US National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors. The novel was based on her first year in the United States as a ten-year-old girl who didn't speak English, in 1975.
Elizabeth Cody Kimmel is an American children's book writer. She is the author of more than forty books ranging from picture books through middle grade and young adult. Both her fiction and non-fiction work often incorporates subjects of personal interest or study, such as history, Tibetan Buddhism, the supernatural, and polar exploration. Kimmel has also published under the names Elizabeth Kimmel Willard, E.C. Kimmel, and Elizabeth Cody.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
