Paul Harbridge and Gracey Zhang are the winners of this year’s Ezra Jack Keats Awards, which celebrate “exceptional early career authors and illustrators for portraying the multicultural nature of our world.”
Harbridge took home the writer’s prize for Out Into the Big Wide Lake, illustrated by Josée Bisaillon. The book follows a young girl with Down syndrome who takes her first solo trip to visit her grandparents.
Zhang won the illustrator’s award for Lala’s Words, which she also wrote. The book tells the story of an energetic young girl who loves tending to plants in a nearby lot. A reviewer for Kirkus praised the book’s art, writing that Zhang’s “use of only two colors—yellow and green—against a gray city to convey the exuberance of Lala’s love and the rejuvenating force of nature is lovely.”
The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation also named four honor books: for writers, Joanna Ho’s Playing at the Border and Anne Wynter’s Everybody in the Red Brick Building, and for illustrators, Marta Bartolj’s Every Little Kindness and Kenesha Sneed’s Many Shapes of Clay.
The Ezra Jack Keats Awards, named after the author and illustrator of the classic The Snowy Day, was established in 1986. Previous winners include writers Deborah Wiles for Freedom Summer and Derrick Barnes for Crown, and illustrators Tao Nyeu for Bunny Days and Ashleigh Corrin for Layla’s Happiness.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
