NCTE recognizes legacy with new Huck Award for children‘s fiction

Charlotte Huck was a champion of using storybooks to teach reading and language arts. For more than 30 years at Ohio State, she built the nation’s first and highly respected graduate program in children’s literature.

“Reading was a part of my life that I so thoroughly enjoyed; I wanted children to have the same opportunities. This became my main goal for teaching children and later, college students,” recalled Huck in a 1997 interview. She died in 2005.

Barbara Kiefer Barbara Kiefer

 

 

 

Now the National Council of Teachers of English is honoring her legacy with the new Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children.

“Charlotte shaped my whole life in literature,” recalled Barbara Kiefer, the Charlotte Huck Professor of Children’s Literature in the College of Education and Human Ecology.

“Charlotte, whose field was elementary education, believed children loved to read. To her, the child was at the center of education. And in the classroom, books should be in the center of all curricula,” Kiefer said.

The NCTE Huck Award recognizes fiction for children or young adults that changes lives, writing that shows girls and boys that they are not the only people in the world feeling pain, joy, anger or loneliness, she said.

2014 Huck winner excites reader's imagination

rain reign“The books receiving Huck Award and Huck Honors this year excite children’s imaginations, allowing them to see world differently. To enter worlds they may not have thought about,” Kiefer said.

The 2014 selection committee “loved them,” she admitted.

The Huck Award went to Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin, a prolific writer. One reviewer wrote that Martin created an “affecting, elegantly burnished middle-grade book about a girl with autism.”

The girl, Rose, and her father both have to face up to difficult truths, Kiefer said. Rosa’s father had to leave his daughter with an uncle. Rose must let go of her beloved dog, Rain, “but she shows a mature and empathetic understanding of human nature as the book comes to a sad but uplifting close,” Kiefer said.

Honors books please young readers

crossoverel deafoThe committee also selected five Huck Honors books, including The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, a novel in verse about college-bound African American twin boys who face a year of life lessons.

His goal as a writer, Kwame said in an NCTE interview, was to have an impact on the lives of boys who are not interested in reading. He recalled one who said, “Yo! I don’ like books but I couldn’t put your book down.” Another group of middle school boys schemed to outvote the girls so The Crossover would win “best book” in a class contest.

Cece Bell’s honor book El Deafo is a graphic novel about “what it was like to wear a giant hearing aid and be the only kid in school to have to wear a giant hearing aid,” she said in the NCTE interview. She called El Deafo “a manual for hearing people,” by showing every person has “friends, best friends, problematic friends, crushes.”

The other Honor Books are Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff, The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee and Revolution by Deborah Wiles.

Two other selection committee members are Department of Teaching and Learning alumni, Detra Price-Demnis (’96 BS, ’97 MA, ’09 PhD), assistant professor of education and inclusion, Teachers College, Columbia University; and Denise Davila (’12 PhD), assistant professor of language and literacy education, University of Georgia.

A complete list of the selection committee’s recommended titles is on the NCTE website.

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