Newbery Award Winner Named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature

Katherine Paterson, photo by Abby Brack

Katherine Paterson, two-time Newbery Award winner for Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved, has been appointed the 2010–11 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress and the Children’s Book Council’s Every Child a Reader initiative. Paterson succeeds Jon Scieszka, who became the first-ever national ambassador in 2008.

An acclaimed children’s and young adult author who has received accolades ranging from the Hans Christian Andersen Medal to two National Book Awards, Paterson is also among those writers whose inclusion in library collections has been frequently challenged. Concerns about Bridge to Terabithia gave it the eighth-most-challenged ranking on the American Library Association’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books List, 1990–99. “Paterson’s own life and her work serve as a model for teachers, parents, and children on the importance of considering other cultures and other ideas—starting in childhood,” exulted Barbara Jones, who as the new director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom expressed her “delight that an incredibly distinguished, but also censored, children’s author was honored in this way.”

“I want people to be reading about children of other places and other races and religions,” Paterson said in the January 4 New York Times. “I think novels are a wonderful way to do that because you get in somebody else’s psyche and you see things quite differently than the way you see things simply through your own eyes.”

Among her duties, Paterson will promote the joy of reading during Children’s Book Week festivities in May and at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in September. “Wherever she goes, I think she’s likely to say something that will not just be what she said the time before,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington told the Times.

American Libraries, Wed, 01/06/2010 - 11:56