Long live Lupine Land

YES!!! I am pinching myself still. Rickshaw Girl was chosen as the 2007 Lupine Honor Winner in the Juvenile/Young Adult category. The Lupine Awards have been presented annually since 1989 by the Youth Services Section of the Maine Library Association. Beloved author/artist Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius was the inspiration for the Lupine Award.

The awards were presented at the annual Reading Round-Up conference held at the Augusta Civic Center on April 17. Things got off to a swell start, with energetic assistance from my Lupine Committee host, Amy Hand, from the Camden Public Library.
Committee Chair, Jan Hamilton, of Prince Memorial Library made the announcements. I was gasping for breath when my turn came to speak. I did remember to thank Charlesbridge Publishing for the pairing of Mitali Perkins, a girl from India, and me, from New Hampshire.

A major thrill was being in the company of Kevin Hawkes, a former island neighbor. I also remembered to mention being mentored by Anne Sibley O’Brien and Scott Nash, other award- winning illustrator/authors also living on the island. But bottom line: Maine is a way cool place, as author Alan Madison discovered. He made the trek from NYC to collect his award in the picture book category for Velma Gratch and the Way Cool Butterfly. illustrated by Kevin.

I also got to gush over Sarah Thomson who wrote the wonderful Dragon’s Egg, one of our family’s favorite chapter books.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Pat Feehan, of University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, gave a rousing talk. WAKE UP PEOPLE she began. Too many kids (and some of us) are fake readers, in that we read it, but we don’t get it. She used Daniel Pink’s A Whole New MInd
as a jumping off point about moving into a conceptual age. We need to be Big Picture Thinkers. Yeah, right on, I’m thinking as I sketched her donning a Viking helmet to make a visual point.

Leave it to the intrepid librarians to give this book a good nudge onto the shelves in Maine. A hearty and huge thank you to the Lupine Committee for choosing Rickshaw Girl. I am blessed!