Winner, Children's Lit Association Book Award

I am thrilled to announce that Racial Innocence has won the 2013 Book Award from the Children's Literature Association. I'm deeply honored to see my book join the ranks with past winners, which include stellar works such as Nathalie op de Beeck's Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), Kimberley Reynolds's Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006), Katharine Capshaw Smith's Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2004), Claudia Nelson's Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (Yale University Press, 1994). When I look at this list (and the much longer list of all the winners and honorable mentions for this award), I realize how deeply these books have influenced me, and how many of them I cite in Racial Innocence or elsewhere. Many, many thanks to the prize committee chaired by Elisabeth Gruner, to ChLA president (and Bryn Mawr College alumna!) Claudia Nelson, and most of all, to the Children's Literature Association for fostering decades of exemplary children's literature scholarship, without which I never could have written Racial Innocence.

"Intellectually exhilarating"

Many thanks to Martha Saxton of Amherst College for her review of Racial Innocence in the current issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Saxton called Racial Innocence

“intellectually exhilarating. . . . Racial Innocence will fascinate and inform readers across numerous disciplines.” Martha Saxton, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 6.1 (Winter 2013): 179-181

The full review has been published in the print version of the journal and will soon be available on the Project Muse website.