ALA Announces Stonewall Awards and Rainbow List for LGBT-Inclusive Kids’ Books

The American Library Association (ALA) on Monday announced its annual Stonewall Book Awards for LGBT-inclusive children’s and young adult books, as well as its more extensive Rainbow List of notable titles. What did they choose this year?

The Stonewall Book Awards — Mike Morgan & Larry Romans Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award (to distinguish them from the Stonewall Book Awards for adult books) are part of the ALA’s Youth Media awards that also include the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott medals. This year, they went to Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, about a transgender boy with a love of music, and Fat Angie by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, about a girl seen by everyone as only her weight, who falls in love with a new girl in town.

The ALA also named three Honor Books: Better Nate Than Ever, by Tim Federle, about a boy who runs away to audition for a Broadway show; Branded by the Pink Triangle, by Ken Setterington, about gay people under Nazi rule; and Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan, about ex-boyfriends who want to break the record for the world’s longest kiss.

The longer Rainbow List is a librarian-recommended list of “quality books with significant and authentic GLBTQ content” for people under 18 years of age. I spoke with librarian Nel Ward, inaugural chair of the Rainbow List committee, back in 2008 when the List first launched. She told me it can be very hard for both kids and librarians to discover LGBT-themed books, since the Library of Congress cataloging information will often use a phrase like “best friends” instead of a description indicating an LGBT relationship. “Librarians want lists so they can help kids access these books,” she said.

The key thing that strikes me about this year’s list is that there are no books for children younger than fourth grade, and most are for teens. There haven’t been many LGBT-inclusive books for young children in the past year, true, but I wish Elizabeth Kushner’s The Purim Superhero had made it, for it is a rare book that not only features same-sex parents, but also puts them in the context of a specific cultural tradition. (Here’s my longer review.) Another possibility would have been Corey Silverberg’s What Makes a Baby, which discusses human reproduction in a way that works for all types of families and parents of all gender identities. (Here’s my previous post about it.) I don’t know if these books were considered and rejected, or did not get submitted for consideration in the first place.

Another observation is that almost all of the books feature LGBTQ youth, but not LGBTQ parents. We need books for and about LGBTQ youth, of course — I just wish that more also featured youth (of any orientation and identity) with LGBTQ parents. Still, the fact that the ALA can pull together such a long list of LGBTQ-inclusive titles year after year for the past seven years speaks volumes (!) about the progress we’ve made towards creating quality resources for our young people that reflect LGBTQ lives.

I am a member of the Amazon Associates program, and get a small referral fee from all purchases made at Amazon.com via links on this site. You are under no obligation to purchase through them.