Limiting consideration to YA-designated titles still leaves the committee with an embarrassment of riches but it also excludes books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time or, this year, Ready Player One, not a great book but certainly YA and a crowd-pleaser. It also takes away what should be at the core of YA librarianship, the responsibility to find and promote materials of value to teens from all kinds of publishers and producers, not just those for whom it makes financial sense to label their products “YA.” What if Book Thief had been published as adult, the way it was overseas? It seems to me a shame and an abnegation of professional responsibility to allow publishers to make the first cut for an award that–I think–should mirror the intrinsic crossover nature of YA librarianship and literature. Oh God, I’m ranting. Sorry!

It may be that the Printz doesn’t need the etched-in-stone criteria of the ALSC awards. The National Book Awards, as someone pointed out somewhere in this discussion, don’t have criteria beyond eligibility, and the Boston Globe Horn-Book Award judges are only told to honor “excellence.” Could that be enough for the Printz?

Roger, please note that I said “bloated?”, and that was a very carefully considered punctuation mark! I haven’t served on the Newbery committee (and given my definite upper YA bias am unlikely to do so), so it seems a bit presumptuous to comment too strongly on something I haven’t lived by. I have lived by the Printz criteria, and whether I say discussion or you say notes, we all mean the same thing: the criteria do not feel finished, which has some definite drawbacks. I think the dialogue (which Sarah and I modeled here, and which happens in various forms for every incarnation of the committee) is critical to the process, but it would be lovely of the dialogue could focus not on grammar and unfinished or unclear notions but only on the meat: what are the markers of (high) quality? When we say literary excellence, what components play into that?

My gut sense is that the criteria have been locked into this seemingly nascent form due to the YA need to say “We’re not the establishment! Yay!” That doesn’t excuse the grammatical issues, but it might explain why specific books are cited years after they have stopped being the best examples of books without moral or uplifting endings, which seems to be what “realistic hope” actually means. Years after a moral or uplifting ending is even expected as the only option. We’ve come a really long way in YA literature. We’ve come a long way as a profession too, and YALSA has had huge momentum as an organization, but we just can’t get over the past: we apologize. We feel the need to state what YA isn’t (problem novels) instead of shouting about the awesome things that it is. We’re still the scrappy kid sibling in the kidlit world (kidlit, the prevalence of the word children’s in publishing imprint names) and I wonder how much of that we bring on ourselves by behaving like the kid? That’s only tangentially related to this, though, so I will stop there and save what could be a rant for a post, perhaps in January.

You’re right about the criteria sounding like Hazel Rochman’s notes, specifically, her responses to suggestions others had made about what they wanted to see included in the criteria. It is rather odd that they stand as the official guidelines so many years later.

I think Sarah and Karyn’s excellent dialogue seen here about the criteria should become part of the official criteria. Their comments are illuminating. I’d love to hear from other people who have served on the Printz Award Committee about how they used or interpreted the criteria.

And while I think that the Printz criteria would benefit from rewriting, ultimately I like that it feels like a discussion, or a starting place for discussion. As a committee member, it felt like permission to thoughtfully consider what constitutes excellence in reading. I didn’t feel intimidated or constricted by someone else’s version of awesome. That (very general) list seemed like permission to take each book on its own terms and ask, was this particular title successful? Does it merit further discussion? Another read? Although the criteria themselves are largely rooted in the negative, the end result for me was that they functioned as a reminder to read from a positive place: what was good about this title?

And now I’m curious about what criteria look like for other awards.

Very quickly, this is what the National Book Award says: “Each panel reads all of the books submitted in their category over the course of the summer. This number typically ranges from 150 titles (Poetry) to upwards of 500 titles (Nonfiction). In September, each panel compiles a “shortlist” of five Finalists. They may arrive at these choices using whatever criteria they deem appropriate, as long as they do not conflict with the official Award guidelines.” And the official guidelines are here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaentry.html

Mark and Karyn, I think another reason the Printz is so different from the Newbery is that the Printz has much more open eligibility rules. Also, frankly, I think at this point in history, we see much more “venturesome creativity” in YA lit than in children’s.