Playing Catch-Up

I love talking to authors through this blog, and reading interviews the other Damsels have done.  It’s always interesting to see into another person’s writing process, and I think it’s important as writers to help promote those in the same genre.  But after authors are featured here, they go on to do other cool things, so this post will highlight the more recent successes of some of our authors we’ve interviewed in the past (almost two!) years.

• Randall Platt’s Hellie Jondoe won four awards, including the Willa Literary Award and the Will Rogers Medallion, both for best YA fiction.  She’s got three new historical novels in the works, one set during the Great Depression and the other two during WWII.
• Pat Lowry Collins’s Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice was added to the 2010 ALA Rainbow List, was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Award from the Boston Author’s Club, and was nominated for a Cybil Award.  She has a new historical novel, Daughter of Winter, which came out in October 2010 and has had great reviews in Booklist, Children’s Literature, and Horn Book.
• Kim Ablon Whitney’s The Other Half of Life won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature and the 2010 Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Teen Readers.  It’s also now out in paperback.
• Karen Cushman’s Alchemy and Meggy Swann was named one of the Children’s Literature Assembly’s 2001 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts, and the audio book was given an ALA Odessey Award.  It’s also a finalist for the Audio Publishers Association Audies’ Award.  She’s working on another Elizabethan England story, Will Sparrow’s Road, and says she encountered some “gender-related challenges” since it’s her first book with a boy as the main character.  She’s also a judge for the School Library Journal’s Battle of the Books 2011, and you can find more info on that at sljbattleofthebooks.com
• Kirby Larson has a new historical novel hitting bookstores in May called The Friendship Doll.  It’s set during the Great Depression and tells the story of a Japanese doll and its effects on four young girls.  In Kirby’s own words, don’t expect her to be cute and cuddly just because she’s a doll!

Congratulations on all of these achievements, ladies!  Congratulations, too, to all the authors who’ve shared with us.  We’re hoping to offer reviews and giveaways of the new books very soon, so keep checking us out!