Phoenix Award

NOMINATIONS FORM

The Children's Literature Association, an organization of teachers, scholars, librarians, editors, writers, illustrators, and parents interested in encouraging the serious study of children's literature, created the Phoenix Award as an outgrowth of the Association's Touchstones Committee. The award, given to a book originally published in the English language, is intended to recognize books of high literary merit, which never won award at the time publication, and which is still worthy of recognition. The Phoenix Award is named after the fabled bird who rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty. Phoenix books also rise from the ashes of neglect and obscurity and once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them.

The recipient of the Phoenix Award has been chosen each year since 1985 by an elected committee of ChLA members that considers nominations made by members and others interested in promoting high critical standards in literature for children. Honor books were instituted in 1989 but have not been named every year.

The Phoenix Award was designed by Caldecott-winning illustrator Trina Schart Hyman. The magical Phoenix on the award statue was specifically drawn for ChLA. The design was sculpted by Diane Davis, who was trained at the Johnson Atelier and Technical Institute of Sculpture, Princeton. Each brass statue is individually cast and inscribed with the year's winner.

In 2003, the ChLA launched an electronic journal, The Phoenix Award Papers. Each issue includes conference papers on the year's Phoenix Award book and Honor book, and the acceptance speech (when available) by the award winner. The Phoenix Papers from 2000 through 2010 are available exclusively online through the Phoenix Papers page.

We are now taking nominations for book that were published in 2001 and after.

The Children's Literature Association Proudly Announces the 2019 Phoenix Award Recipient:

The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich
Hyperion, 1999

Taking young Omakayas through one year of shifting seasons, Louise Erdrich’s beautifully written The Birchbark House offers memorable characters; rich, vivid settings and experiences; and authentic historical detail. The rhythm of Omakayas’s daily life—the chores she hates, her relationships with her siblings, her friendship with Andeg the crow—provides insight into the Ojibwa experience in the mid-nineteenth century. The author populates her novel with complex, larger-than-life figures like Old Tallow, a powerful and isolated old woman who plays an important role in Omakayas’s life. Erdrich’s illustrations heighten the sense of place and reinforce the book’s gentle humor. By offering young readers an opportunity to explore how Native Americans viewed the white man’s tyranny, the novel serves as a counterpoint to prevailing narratives of the “frontier.” Combining realism and mysticism to create a layered but cohesive story, The Birchbark House captures the importance of storytelling as a means to preserve cultural memory.

2019 Phoenix Honor Book: 

Imani All Mine by Connie Porter
Houghton Mifflin/Mariner, 1999

The emotional intensity of Imani All Mine comes from the pitch-perfect voice of teen mother Tasha from inner-city Buffalo. This fifteen-year-old’s African-American vernacular never flags in its raw power to shock and compel belief. Her baby girl Imani, or faith, becomes the abiding source of Tasha’s will to surmount rape, racism, and drug-dealing violence. Tasha’s love for her daughter and her anguished attempts to be a good mother, despite her youth and ignorance, endure without support from her own single mother and many teachers. Her terror that she might have harmed Imani by shaking her in a moment of frustration is as palpable as her horror of contact with the boy who preyed upon her. The book is heart-rending and hilarious, hurtful and healing in its surprising turns of phrase and truthfulness to Tasha’s lived experience. Connie Porter’s rendering of sexuality, maternity, and spirituality reveals Tasha’s inimitable being with daring originality.