Winners of the 2024 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award announced

The winners of this year’s Boston Globe-Horn Book Award include Do you remember? by Sydney Smith, Remember us by Jacqueline Woodson, The Mona Lisa disappears by Nicholas Day and Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford.

The 2024 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced this week and recognize books in three categories – picture book, fiction and nonfiction/poetry. Winning titles must be first editions of U.S. books published between June 2023 and May 2024, but can be written or illustrated by citizens of any country.

The winner of the picture book is Do you remember? by Sydney Smith (Neal Porter Books, an imprint of Holiday House). Two honorary picture book titles were selected: I’m from by Gary R. Gray, Jr., illustrated by Oge Mora (Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers); and Ode to a bad day by Chelsea Lin Wallace, illustrated by Hyewon Yum (Chronicle Books).

The winner of the Fiction category is rebecome a member by Jacqueline Woodson (Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House).

The two fiction honor books are The Bloody Years by Elana K. Arnold (Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers) and Rez Ball by Byron Graves (Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers).

For the non-fiction/poetry category, the jury selected two different winners.

The winner of the Nonfiction Award is The Mona Lisa disappears: A legendary painter, a shocking robbery and the birth of a world celebrity by Nicholas Day, illustrated by Brett Helquist (Random House Studio, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House). The winner in the poetry category is Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division).

An honorary book was selected in the Nonfiction/Poetry category: Mushrooms grow by Maria Gianferrari, illustrated by Diana Sudyka (Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division).

A special award was given to The new Brownie book: A love letter to black families by Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer (Chronicle Books). It was the first time since 2008 that the jury gave a special award.

The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were awarded by an independent panel of three judges selected by The Horn Book Editor-in-Chief Elissa Gershowitz. This year’s judges were: Chair Cathryn Mercier, director of the graduate program in children’s literature at Simmons University in Boston, MA; Katrina Hedeen Eftekhari, former editor at The Horn Book and children’s librarian at the Medfield (MA) Public Library; and Rodney Fierce, humanities teacher at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, CA.

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