The winners of the 2024 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award have been announced

This year’s Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners include Do you remember? by Sydney Smith, Remember us by Jacqueline Woodson, The Mona Lisa disappears from Nicholas Day, and Relatives: Rooted in hope by Carole Boston Weatherford.

2024 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced this week, honoring books in three categories: Picture Book, Fiction and Nonfiction/Poetry. Winning titles must be US first editions of books published between June 2023 and May 2024, but may be written or illustrated by citizens of any country.

The Picture Book winner is Do you remember? by Sydney Smith (Neal Porter Books, an imprint of Holiday House). Two honorary titles of the Book of Photographs were chosen: I am from by Gary R. Gray, Jr., illus. by Oge Mora (Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers); AND Ode to a bad day by Chelsea Lin Wallace, illus. by Hyewon Yum (Books of Chronicles).

The winner of Fiction is NEWjoined Na by Jacqueline Woodson (Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House).

The two Honor Books are Fiction Years of blood by Elana K. Arnold (Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers) and Rez Ball by Byron Graves (Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers).

For the Nonfiction/Poetry category, the judges selected two separate winners.

The winner of the Nonfiction Award is The Mona Lisa Disappears: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Theft, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity by Nicholas Day, illus. by Brett Helquist (Random House Studio, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House). The Poetry winner is Relatives: Rooted in hope by Carole Boston Weatherford, illus. by Jeffery Boston Weatherford (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of the Children’s Publishing Division of Simon & Schuster).

An Honorary Book was selected for Nonfiction/Poetry: Mushrooms grow by Maria Gianferrari, illus. by Diana Sudyka (Beach Lane Books, an imprint of the Children’s Publishing Division of Simon & Schuster).

A Special Citation was awarded The New Brownies Book: A Love Letter to Black Families by Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer (Chronicle Books). It was the first time since 2008 that the judges presented a Special Citation.

The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were selected by an independent panel of three judges appointed by The Book of the Horn editor-in-chief Elissa Gershowitz. This year’s judges were: chair Cathryn Mercier, director of the children’s literature graduate program at Simmons University in Boston, MA; Katrina Hedeen Eftekhari, former editor at The Book of the Horn and a children’s librarian at the Medfield (MA) Public Library; and Rodney Fierce, a humanities teacher at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, CA.

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