Edited Book Award

Awarded annually by the Children's Literature Association to recognize the contribution of outstanding collections of essays to children's literature scholarship and criticism.

Nomination Form

((Awards are given for books published two years prior to the award year. Now accepting nominations for books published in 2021.)

Submission Period: 

Nominations may be submitted through Friday, September 30, 2022. 

Submission Guidelines:

  • Nominations should be submitted online through the ChLA website.

  • Eligible titles must be published, book-length edited collections that make a distinct or significant contribution to our understanding of children’s literature from a literary, cultural, historical, or theoretical perspective.

  • The focus of the volume should be a literary, historical, theoretical, or cultural examination of children’s literature, children’s texts, children’s media and/or children’s culture. Critical biographies and studies of children’s films and other media texts are included in these criteria, as are studies that include to a minor degree texts primarily intended for adults. Volumes with a primarily pedagogical focus are not included, nor are anthologies, reference works, textbooks, honors papers, master’s theses, or doctoral dissertations, unless reworked as a book.

  • They must be written in English exclusively by the authors whose names appear in the list of contributors and the editor(s) whose name(s) appear on the title page.

  • Books must bear a copyright date of the year under consideration.

  • Biographical studies and studies of children's films and other media are eligible for nomination.

  • New editions of previously published books and books containing reprints of previously published essays are not eligible.

  • Volumes with a primarily pedagogical focus and reference works are not eligible.

Past Edited Book Award Winners:

(Awards are given for books published two years prior to the award year.)

2020 (awarded 2022)
Winner: Cristina Herrera and Trevor Boffone for Nerds, Goths, Geeks and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, University Press of Mississippi, 2020

Honor: Rachel Conrad and L. Kennedy Brown for Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

2019 (awarded 2021)
Winner: Kenneth Kidd and Derritt Mason for Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality, Fordham University Press, 2019

2018 (awarded 2020)
Winner: Ymitri Matheson for Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction, University Press of Mississippi, 2018

Honor: Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day for The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children's and Adolescent Literature and Culture, Routledge, 2018

2017 (awarded 2019)
Winner: Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane for Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900, University of Minnesota Press, 2017

2016 (awarded 2018)
Winner: Lisa Rowe Fraustino and Karen Coats for Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism, UP Mississippi, 2016

Honor: Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston for Fairy-tale Films Beyond Disney: International Perspectives, Routledge, 2016

Honor: Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker for The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture, Routledge, 2016

2015 (awarded 2017)
Winner: Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer for Children’s Literature and the Avante-Garde, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015

Honor book: Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer for Girls, Texts, Cultures, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015

2014 (awarded 2016)
Winner: Claudia Mills for Ethics and Children’s Literature, Ashgate, 2014

Honor book: Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey for Grimms’ Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of their International Reception, Wayne State University Press, 2014

Recommended book: Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy for Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, Wayne State University Press, 2014

2013 (awarded 2015)
Winner: Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz for Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, Routledge, 2013

Honor book: John Stephens for Subjectivity in Asian Children's Literature: Global Theories and Implications, Routledge, 2013

Honor book: Nora Maguire and Beth Rodgers for Children's Literature on the Move: Nations, Translations, Migrations, Four Courts Press, 2013

2012 (awarded 2014)
Winner: Katia Pizzi for Pinocchio, Puppets, and Modernity: The Mechanical Body, Routledge, 2012

Honor book: Sophie Raynard for The Teller's Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers, SUNY Press, 2012

2011 (awarded 2013)
Winner: Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone, for The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press, 2011

Honor book: Jackie C. Horne and Joe Sutliff Sanders, for Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden a Children's Classic at 100. Scarecrow Press, 2011.

2010 (awarded 2012)
Winner: Jackie C. Horne and Donna R. White, for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Childrens Classic at 100. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

2009 (awarded 2011)
Winner: Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries, for Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire (England) and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.