Watch Booklist Celebrate the Carnegies with Winners Ed Yong and Julie Otsuka!

I spent 2022 doing a lot of things, but nothing in my work life will be more memorable to me than my time on the selection committee for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellent in Fiction and Nonfiction. I have written about it a lot on this blog and you can see those posts here.

I will not lie and say it was easy to make the time to read hundreds of books and decide, as part of a committee, which ones deserved the long list, let alone the shortlist, and then the $5,000 prizes. But, I will tell you every minute was worth it. This is an experience I am glad I made time for, and I will forever hold a special place in my heart for the people I served with and the books we chose. 

The final event for our committee was the celebration of the winners at ALA Annual. I organized my entire ALA Annual experience around this event and even made sure to get our committee together for a pre-event dinner. 

The ceremony was wonderful and thanks to Booklist, all of you can now watch it too. Below I have copied the information Booklist is currently sharing on the homepage including the video itself. 

Save this post for when you need some inspiration, for a day when you need to remember why you do this job. Trust me. It will help. I know all of you won't have the same intensity of feelings about this as I did, but I spoke to many people that night, and everyone had wonderful things to say about the speakers and their inspiring messages.

Watch Booklist Celebrate the Carnegies with Winners Ed Yong and Julie Otsuka!

The 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were celebrated at the American Writers Museum during ALA’s Annual Conference in June. We were honored to hear from keynote speaker Chris Abani (Smoking the Bible, 2022) and award winners Julie Otsuka (The Swimmers, 2022) and Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, 2022). 

Watch a recording of the entire event below! Thanks to the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and NoveList for making this event possible.