Award of the Week- Printz Award

The Michael L. Printz Award is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. It is named for a Topeka, Kansas school librarian who was a long-time active member of the Young Adult Library Services Association. The first award was given in 2000 and all winners are listed below.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Printz Award 2018
	We Are Okay By: Nina LaCour After picking up and leaving everything behind in California, eighteen-year-old Marin, with the help of her former friend, must confront her grief and the truths that caused her to flee her home.
2017
	March: Book Three By: John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell In this third book in the March series, Congressman John Lewis focuses on how he, along with others, fought for equal voting rights for all Americans. It begins with the September 16, 1963, bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. This violent act set the stage for a protracted, difficult, and physically dangerous campaign to ensure that every American could exercise the right to vote.
2016
	Bone Gap By: Laura Ruby Eighteen-year-old Finn, an outsider in his quiet Midwestern town, is the only witness to the abduction of town favorite Roza, but his inability to distinguish between faces makes it difficult for him to help with the investigation, and subjects him to even more ridicule and bullying.
2015
	I’ll Give You the Sun By: Jandy Nelson Jude and her brother, Noah, are incredibly close twins. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude surfs and cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking.
2014
	Midwinterblood By: Marcus Sedgwick Seven linked vignettes unfold on a Scandinavian island inhabited–throughout various time periods–by Vikings, vampires, ghosts, and a curiously powerful plant.
2013
	In Darkness By: Nick Lake In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, fifteen-year-old Shorty, a poor gang member from the slums of Site Soleil, is trapped in the rubble of a ruined hospital, and as he grows weaker he has visions and memories of his life of violence, his lost twin sister, and of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who liberated Haiti from French rule in the 1804.
2012
	Where Things Come Back By: John Corey Whaley Seventeen-year-old Cullen’s summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin’s death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother’s sudden disappearance.
2011
	Ship Breaker By: Paolo Bacigalupi In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl in the wreckage, he must decide if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.
2010
	Going Bovine By: Libba Bray In an attempt to find a cure after being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s (aka mad cow) disease, Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old boy, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital.
2009
	Jellicoe Road By: Melina Marchetta High school student Taylor Markham, who was abandoned by her drug-addicted mother at the age of eleven, struggles with her identity and family history at a boarding school in Australia.
2008
	The White Darkness By: Geraldine McCaughrean Taken to Antarctica by the man she thinks of as her uncle for what she believes to be a vacation, Symone–a troubled fourteen-year-old–discovers that he is dangerously obsessed with seeking Symmes’s Hole, an opening that supposedly leads into the center of a hollow Earth.
2007
	American Born Chinese By: Gene Luen Yang Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture. Presented in comic book format.
2006
	Looking for Alaska By: John Green Sixteen-year-old Miles’ first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama includes good friends and great pranks, but is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash.
2005
	How I Live Now By: Meg Rosoff To get away from her pregnant stepmother in New York City, fifteen-year-old Daisy goes to England to stay with her aunt and cousins, with whom she instantly bonds, but soon war breaks out and rips apart the family while devastating the land.
2004
	The First Part Last By: Angela Johnson Bobby’s carefree teenage life changes forever when he becomes a father and must care for his adored baby daughter.
2003
	Postcards from No Man’s Land By: Aidan Chambers Alternates between two stories–contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother–and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers’ attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.
2002
	A Step from Heaven By: An Na Young Ju Park is unhappy with her journey to America as her family suffers hard times upon their arrival, yet when her father suddenly becomes violent, Young Ju is thankful when he leaves so that her family can start over.
2001
	Kit’s Wilderness By: David Almond Thirteen-year-old Kit goes to live with his grandfather in the decaying coal mining town of Stoneygate, England, and finds both the old man and the town haunted by ghosts of the past.
2000
	Monster By: Walter Dean Myers While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.