Jordan Scott and Sydney Smith, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Paula Yoo are the winners of the 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, the Horn Book Magazine announced in a news release. The prizes are given annually to outstanding achievement in children’s literature.
Author Scott and illustrator Smith won the picture book award for I Talk Like a River, about a young boy who struggles with stuttering. The book previously won the Schneider Family Book Award.
Williams-Garcia’s A Sitting in St. James was awarded the fiction and poetry prize; the novel, which a reviewer for Kirkus called “a marathon masterpiece,” follows a 19th-century Louisiana family and the enslaved people who serve them.
Yoo took home the nonfiction award for From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial That Galvanized the Asian American Movement, about the 1982 slaying of a Chinese American man in Michigan. In an interview with Kirkus, Yoo said she hopes her book has “a positive impact on young readers in terms of showing them that they have a voice, that their lives, their history, and their heritage matter.”
The Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards were established in 1967. Previous winners include Elizabeth Acevedo for The Poet X, Angie Thomas for The Hate U Give, and Rebecca Stead for When You Reach Me.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
