2025 ALA Awards

The American Library Association (ALA) announced the winners of the Youth Media Awards during their LibLearnX conference, at a ceremony held Monday, January 27 in Phoenix AZ. Winners included several works and authors of genre interest.

The Alex Awards honor books for adults that “have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.” This year, at least four adult books of genre interest appeared on the complete list of ten:

• The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
• The Witch of Colchis, Rosie Hewlett (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• I Was a Teenage Slasher, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
• The Witchstone, Henry H. Neff (Blackstone)

Science fiction book The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow), won the John Newbery medal for distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

YA fantasy Night Owls by A. R. Vishny (HarperCollins Children’s) won the Sydney Taylor Award (YA category) for books for young readers that “exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience.”

Spooky Estonian story John the Skeleton by Triinu Laan, illustrated by Marja-Liisa Plats and translated by Adam Cullen (Yonder), won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for a children’s book “originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States.”

Lunar Boy by Jes & Cin Wibowo (HarperAlley) won the Stonewall Book Award (Children’s Literature category) for “English-language works of exceptional merit for children or teens relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience.”

A Little Like Magic, a fantasy picture book by Sarah Kurpiel (Rocky Pond) won the Schneider Family Book Award (Younger Children’s category) for a book “that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience.”

Craig Kofi Farmer won the Coretta Scott King John Steptoe New Talent Award as the writer of fantasy adventure Kwame Crashes the Underworld (Roaring Brook). The Corretta Scott King awards honor “outstanding African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults that demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values.”

Karla Arenas Valenti won the Pura Belpré Award in the Children’s Author category for Lola, a fantasy book (Knopf Young Readers); the Belpré Awards honor works that celebrate “the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature.”