Tomie dePaola Wins ALA Award!

So many wonderful books received awards from the American Library Association earlier this week. You can view the complete list of ALA's Youth Media Awards online. But I wanted to give a big HURRAH! to one of my favorite author/illustrators who received special recognition from ALA for his body of work: Tomie dePaola. DePaola received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, "honoring an author or illustrator, published in the United States, whose books have made a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children."

There are so many reasons to love Tomie: his sense of humor, his appreciation of a child's perspective, his beautiful artwork, his versatility. He writes, he illustrates. He works with both fiction and nonfiction, folktales and nursery rhymes, bible stories and poetry. I think I became particularly fond of Tomie when I discovered he shares my Irish/Italian heritage - which he describes in his autobiography 26 Fairmount Avenue, a 2000 Newbery Honor winner.