BTW News Briefs

Ezra Jack Keats Children’s Book Awards Announced

The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation in partnership with the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi have announced the winners of the 2014 Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Awards.

Ame Dyckman, author of Tea Party Rules (Penguin), will receive the New Writer Award and the book’s illustrator, K.G. Campbell, will receive an Ezra Jack Keats Honor Book Award. Christian Robinson, illustrator for Rain! (Houghton Mifflin), will receive the New Illustrator Award. Dyckman and Robinson will each receive a gold medallion and $1,000.

New Writer Honor Book Awards will be given to Pat Zietlow Miller for Sophie’s Squash (Random House) and Linda Davick for I Love You, Nose! I Love You, Toes! (Simon & Schuster). In addition to Campbell, New Illustrator Honor Book Award winners include Aaron Meshon for Take Me Out to the Yakyu (Atheneum) and Marta Altés for My Grandpa (Abrams).

The 28th annual awards will be presented at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival on April 10 at the University of Southern Mississippi and award-winning author Kathi Appelt will be a guest presenter.

Michael Carley to Leave Simon & Schuster

After 34 years at Simon & Schuster, sales rep Michael Carley will be retiring on April 22. Carley joined Simon & Schuster in 1980 as the field sales manager for the Pacific Northwest, working with more than 300 accounts in five states. Carley was honored as sales rep of the year on three occasions at Simon & Schuster for his advocacy and work with his accounts and with the publisher’s titles and authors.

Prior to his work at Simon & Schuster, Carley was a field sales rep for Viking and a bookseller at The Elliott Bay Book Company. Elliott Bay’s Rick Simonson said of Carley, “He is one by whom others are measured against — what he brought to his sales calls, what he brought to being part of the store and the community. The good times were so many, even when they didn’t so much involve books, at least not in a straightforward way.”