Jane Addams Book Awards

Winners of the 2006 Jane Addams Children's Book Awards were announced on April 28, 2006 by the Jane Addams Peace Association (JAPA). Since 1915, JAPA has been the educational arm of the Women's International league for Peace and Freedom.

Books chosen effectively address themes or topics that promote peace, justice, world community, and/or equality of the sexes and all races. The books also must meet conventional standards of literary and artistic excellence. The Awards will be presented on October 20, 2006 in New York City.

Award Winning Book for Young Children

Delivering Justice: W. W. Law and the Fight for Civil Rights, written by Jim Haskins and illustrated by Benny Andrews. Candlewick Press.

Mr. Law, a mail carrier by trade and a courageous activist by conviction, catalyzed and led his community in the peaceful integration of all public facilities in Savannah, Georgia in the 1940s and well beyond. The story is accompanied by expressive oil-and-collage illustrations by Andrews.

Award Winning Book for Older Children

Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, the Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America, by Karen Blumenthal. Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster.

Replete with photos, comic strips, and progress "score cards," the book provides exciting moment-by-moment political coverage of the 1971 bill that ensures equal education for girls.

Honor Book for Young Children

Poems to Dream Together=Poemas Para Soñar Juntos, by Francisco X. Alarc—n, illustrated by Paula Barragán. Lee and Low Books, Inc.

In nineteen short and heartfelt poems in Spanish and English, Alarc—n encourages and inspires us to dream alone and to work and dream together, as families and communities, in order to make our hopes for a better world come true. The stylized paintings of Paula Barragán colorfully extend and interpret the theme.

Honor Books for Older Children

The Crazy Man, by Pamela Porter. Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press. Porter's novel intertwines the emotional lives of an injured girl, a dazed mother, a runaway father, and a mental patient. Spare free-verse narration of twelve-year-old Emaline tells a story in which everyone is challenged to change in this 1960's Saskatchewan community.

>weetgrass Basket, by Marlene Carvell. Dutton Children's Books/ Penguin Young Readers Group. This story is told in the alternating voices of two young Mohawk sisters. Each describes leaving her beloved home to be schooled in the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Devoted to each other and their father, but opposite in personality and outlook, the sisters experience their virtual imprisonment differently: Mattie is rashly defiant; Sarah, fearfully obedient ñ until it's too late.