Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature

The Michael L. Printz Award annually honors the best book written for teens, based entirely on its literary merit, each year. In addition, the Printz Committee names up to four honor books, which also represent the best writing in young adult literature. The awards announcement is made at the ALA Midwinter Meeting as part of the Youth Media Awards and is celebrated with a program and reception each year at the ALA Annual Conference.

The award's namesake was a school librarian in Topeka, Kansas, and a marketing consultant for Econo-Clad, as well an active member of YALSA. He had a passion for books and reading. He also appreciated the authors who wrote books for young adults and demonstrated this by initiating an author-in-residence program at his high school. The award is sponsored by Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association.

In Darkness (Hardcover)

By Nick Lake
$17.99
ISBN-13: 9781599907437
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Bloomsbury USA Childrens, 1/2012
Other Editions of this Title
2013 Michael L. Printz Winner: Bloomsbury is proud to be the global publisher of In Darkness, a stunning tour-de-force set in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. "Shorty" is a Haitian boy trapped in the ruins of a hospital when the earth explodes around him. Surrounded by lifeless bodies and growing desperately weak from lack of food and water, death seems imminent. Yet as Shorty waits in darkness for a rescue that may never come, he becomes aware of another presence, one reaching out to him across two hundred years of history. It is the presence of slave and revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, whose life was marred by violence, and whose own end came in darkness. What unites a child of the slums with the man who would shake a troubled country out of slavery? Is it the darkness they share . . . or is it hope?
Raw, harrowing, and peopled with vibrant characters, In Darkness is an extraordinary book about the cruelties of man and nature, and the valiant, ongoing struggle for a country's very survival.

Where Things Come Back (Paperback)

By John Corey Whaley
$8.99
ISBN-13: 9781442413344
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 5/2012
Other Editions of this Title
2012 Michael L. Printz Winnner:

In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter's senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town. His cousin overdoses; his town becomes absurdly obsessed with the alleged reappearance of an extinct woodpecker; and most troubling of all, his sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother, Gabriel, suddenly and inexplicably disappears.

Meanwhile, the crisis of faith spawned by a young missionary's disillusion in Africa prompts a frantic search for meaning that has far-reaching consequences. As distant as the two stories initially seem, they are woven together through masterful plotting and merge in a surprising and harrowing climax.

This extraordinary tale from a rare literary voice finds wonder in the ordinary and illuminates the hope of second chances.
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