A Puppy Come in from the Storm

This is what it looks like to win the Newbery Award. This sweet lady is Laura Amy Schlitz, Baltimore school librarian and author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, which took home the top honor at the American Library Association's January meeting.
As priceless as the image itself is, check out this older interview with Schlitz from the School Library Journal website, where she explains how much she loves her publisher, Candlewick.

I’ve always written. I wrote two novels and about a dozen plays before Candlewick Press decided to publish “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies”* I’ve always written, but I’d pretty much given up on being published.

I’m not going to go into why I was on the point of giving up, because it’s a long story, and I can’t tell it without weeping copiously. Suffice to say I was thoroughly discouraged and I even thought of giving up writing, but I never got around to it. Luckily, I had two guardian angels. One was the Park School, which has been extraordinarily supportive of my writing, providing me with inspiration, encouragement, and grant money. The other was Candlewick Press.

I’ll tell you how I feel about Candlewick Press. I had a friend who found a puppy in the street one New Year’s Eve. It was sleeting, and she heard the puppy whimpering, so she scooped it up and took it to a New Year’s Eve party. One minute the puppy was outside shivering, and the next minute it was sitting in front of the fire, licking champagne and Beef Wellington off the fingers of the party guests. That’s me and Candlewick Press.

So congratulations to Schlitz, and to Candlewick, and to my friend and fellow writer/editor, Mary Lee, who was Schlitz's editor for Good Masters!