Michael L. Printz Award
for Excellence in Young Adult Literature

2000 Award Winner

Monster by Walter Dean Myers  -  YA Myers                                                      
Walter Dean Myers was named the first winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults. "Monster," illustrated by Christopher Myers and published by HarperCollins, tells the suspenseful, emotionally charged story of a 16-year-old arrested for murder.

Myers, of Jersey City, N.J., developed "Monster," edited by Phoebe Yeh, out of 600 hours of interviews with prisoners in jails and New Jersey and New York. His is the recipient of a Margaret A. Edwards Award for distinguished contribution to young adult literature. The five-time Coretta Scott King Award winner and a recipient of Newbery Honor Awards for "Scorpions" and "Somewhere in the Darkness."

2000 Honor Bookshardlove.gif (25703 bytes)

Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger -  YA Wittlinger, E      
"Hard Love," edited by David Gale," is about a 16-year-old who falls in love with a "rich, spoiled, lesbian, private-school-gifted-and-talented writer virgin." According to Bradburn, "With funning, fast-paced dialogue and vivid, off-beat characters, this story of love, friendship and a fractured family, is rooted in the contemporary zine scene."  

Wittlinger is a former children's librarian and author of two other young adult novels – "Noticing Paradise" and "Lombardo's Law."

 

Skellig by David Almond - YA ALM                                                                                       skellig.gif (29543 bytes)
Unhappy about his baby sister's illness and the chaos of moving into a dilapidated old house, Michael retreats to the garage and finds a mysterious stranger who is something like a bird and something like an angel.

Almond, who grew up in northeast England's, has been a mailman, a brush salesman, editor and teacher. "Skellig" received the 1999 Great Britain Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award. Almond's latest book, "Kit's Wilderness," will be released in March.

 


 Speak by Laura Hulse Anderson - YA AND                                                                        speak.gif (24718 bytes)
 A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.  The event has silenced Melinda and caused her to be rejected by her fellow students.  This compelling, first-person narrative carries the reader from Melinda's state of isolation to the moment she finds the power to speak."

"Speak" is Anderson's first novel. She gathered her material by listening to her teenage daughter and her friends as she drove her friends to and from school.