Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid about racial identity recently won the John Newbery Medal, the first graphic novel to win the prestigious award. It was also the winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature and is a New York Times bestseller.
Craft’s novel centers on seventh-grader Jordan Banks who loves drawing cartoons and wants to go to art school one day. Instead is sent to a prestigious academic school, the Riverdale Academy Day School. Jordan is the only student of color at the prep school. He is forced to balance two very different lives, one with the preppy kids at Riverdale and one with his friends in Washington Heights, and Jordan feels that he doesn’t fit in either world. This is an emotional and eye-opening book that has the added element of being visually exciting for readers young and old.
Kwame Alexander won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for The Undefeated, “an ode to African-American life and accomplishments, it includes references to slavery, the civil rights movements and black heroes such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and others.” Both authors of color won the Coretta Scott King Awards, recognizing achievement in African-American authors and illustrators. Alexander won a Newbery in 2015 for his book, The Crossover.
