Josette Frank Award

The Josette Frank Award is an American children's literary award for fiction given annually by the Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education. It "honors a book or books of outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally".^[1]

Gary D. Schmidt, winner of the 2024 Josette Frank Award for his novel The Labors of Hercules Beal, wrote in his acceptance letter, "If it can be said that awards such as the Josette Frank award fight for children, then Bank Street has, for many years, fought valiantly for children. You’ve held high standards of artistic excellence AND encouraged writers and illustrators who want to talk about the world that real children inhabit, even if it’s a pretty broken world that fills those pages. Just listing those titles suggests how the award has honored books that are honest accounts, that point to a world that doesn’t always value children and their experience, a world that often wars against them. But these books assert that in that world are children whose lives are mighty and lovely, and that their immediate experience is not always to be determined by the brokenness children find around them every single day. What could possibly be more important in today’s literature than a book that a child could pick up, read, and come away saying, 'I can grow too'?"^[2]

Known as the Children's Book Award from 1943 to 1997, it was renamed in honor of Josette Frank, the editor of many anthologies for children and a former Executive Director of the Child Study Association of America.^[1][3] The prize to the author of the book has been provided by the Florence L. Miller Memorial Fund.

The Josette Frank Award is one of several prominent awards that the Children's Book Committee gives each year. The Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, established in 1994, is presented to "a distinguished work of nonfiction that serves as an inspiration to young people." The Claudia Lewis Award, given for the first time in 1998, honors the best poetry book of the year. The Margaret Wise Brown Board Book Award, a biennial award, presented to published or adapted board books, was established in 2023 and honored books published in 2021-2022.^[4]

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