The official Newbery Award and Honor books are selected by a committee from the American Library Association (ALA) and awarded every January for “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in English in the United States during the preceding year.”
The Eva Perry Mock Newbery Club is a group of about 25 6th–9th-graders who read newly written books, some of them donated to the club as advance reader copies (see below) . We read books from April through January, listing and discussing our favorites in our blog, and nominating the very best for our own Mock Newbery Awards. We select our winners just before the official winners are announced by the ALA each year. We have also traveled to ALA conferences in 2002, 2007 and 2010, and visited local authors.
Our club was started in 1998 by Teresa Young Brantley, an official member of the 1999 Newbery committee that chose Holes by Louis Sachar as its winner.
Help Us Read
Due to meeting space restrictions, our club is limited to 25 members who ask to join the club early each year. Although members have already been selected for this year’s club, everyone is welcome to read what we are reading and post comments on our blog. Send us an e-mail to let us know which book you think is the best of the year: lindsey.dunn@wakegov.com and mchoate@wakegov.com.
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