Newbery and Printz 2010

Snoopy dance of joy for Rebecca Stead and Libba Bray!!!

This morning, Rebecca Stead won the 2010 Newbery Award for her beautifully crafted novel WHEN YOU REACH ME, and Libba Bray won the 2010 Printz Award for her brilliantly hilarious novel GOING BOVINE.

I love it when nice things happen to nice people. Both Rebecca and Libba are awesome people in addition to being fantastic writers.

I first met Rebecca when we were both members of a debut-author group called the Class of 2k7. (Her excellent debut novel FIRST LIGHT came out the same year as my debut novel INTO THE WILD.) She's always been so friendly and sweet and gracious. I was so excited to hear she'd won the Newbery. Bet she was too!

Libba is simply hilarious, both on the page and in person. I've had the pleasure of hanging out with her at various teen author events in Manhattan, most recently at a Teen Author Reading Night where we both read from our books. While the rest of us read our scenes in the usual chronological order, Libba asked the audience to call out page numbers and read a selection of random pages from GOING BOVINE. It was the best reading I've ever heard. And of course, there's this.

So please join me in dancing for Rebecca and Libba, as well as all the other winners and honorees of today's American Library Association awards. See the full list here.

Sometimes the universe gets things right. Well done, ALA.