Congratulations to our Article Award Winners

ChLA’s Article Award Committee happily announced this year’s winners at the annual conference in Indianapolis.

Brigitte Fielder won the Article Award with her essay “Black Girls, White Girls, American Girls: Slavery and Racialized Perspectives in Abolitionist and Neoabolitionist Children’s Literature,” published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (vol. 36, no. 2). The committee notes that Fielder’s study of racialized perspectives and inter-racial friendship in abolitionist and neoabolitionist children’s literature is a forceful study of how contemporary children’s literature reinvents, echoes, and modifies nineteenth-century discourses about race, racism, and enslavement. The article is impressive for its historical acumen and engagement with current scholarship in children's literature studies. Moreover, Dr. Fielder’s crisp writing and clear her argumentation effectively deconstructs and names the assumptions of a normative White reader in our field.

The committee also named two Honors. The committee commends Amanda Greenwell's fresh treatment of Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley: Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America,” published in Children’s Literature (vol. 45) for addressing a classic children’s novel that has not received enough critical attention. Her work foregoes common readings of the novel as a race-liberal friendship narrative to persuasively consider how Jackson exposes systemic racial discrimination. This article highlights the status of Jackson’s text as a protest novel and tackles the overlooked topic of racial discrimination within recreational spaces. 

Ashley Hope Pérez and Patricia Enciso received the committee’s second Honor for “Decentering Whiteness and Monolingualism in the Reception of Latinx YA Literature,” published in The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe (vol. 33, no. 5). The committee admires that Pérez and Enciso make clear how monolingual reviewers have evaluated Latinx young adult literature in ways that repeatedly assume that a novel’s use of Spanish should be “manageable” for a White readership. The article dismantles the assumption that today’s young readers are White and monolingual and that “authenticity” in the text needs to fit the expectations of the dominant culture. The authors' work provides several critical tools for scholars going forward.

Thank you to our 2018–2019 Article Award Committee members: KaaVonia Hinton, Carrie Hintz, Laura Jiménez, Tali Noimann, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, and Lance Weldy. We encourage all ChLA members to read this exciting work in our field! And don’t forget to nominate essays and chapters published in 2018 for next year’s award. You can do so by navigating to https://www.childlitassn.org/article-award.

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