2011 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults

The YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, like the Morris Award, announces a shortlist of up to five titles about six weeks before the ALA Midwinter Meeting. At Midwinter, the winner is announced and the other titles on the shortlist are Honor titles.

The Committee releases its Vetted Nominations List. With the removal of non-fiction titles from BBYA (now BFYA), the nominations list serves as an additional source for nonfiction titles. Unlike the BBYA/BFYA list, nominated titles aren’t announced during the year; it’s only after Midwinter that the list is announced.

The Award went to Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing by Ann Angel (Amulet Books, 2010) (my review).

The Four Honor Books were

They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) (my review);

Spies of Mississippi:  The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement by Rick Bowers (National Geographic Society, 2010) (my review);

The Dark Game: True Spy Stories by Paul Janeczko (Candlewick Press, 2010); and

Every Bone Tells a Story: Hominin Discoveries, Deductions, and Debates by Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw (Charlesbridge, 2010) (my review).

The 2011 official nomination list has an additional fifteen titles, including Watch This Space: Designing, Defending and Sharing Public Spaces by Hadley Dyer and Marc Ngui (Kids Can Press, 2010) (my review).

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