And the Winners Are

the 2025 Youth Media Awards

Hello readers! Yesterday was THE BIG DAY in children’s literature ~ the Youth Media Awards announcement! I’m excited to share the winners with you, as well as a brief commentary on my experience on the School Library Journal Heavy Medal Mock Newbery panel and my school’s Mock Caldecott activity.

I typically watch or listen to Youth Media Awards announcements live, but this year I was teaching 6th graders about paraphrasing and direct quotation of graphic novels as requested by ELA teachers. I tuned in whenever I could between classes and devoured the winner list afterward, and then of course recapped it with one of my best librarian friends via text.

Why do I get so excited about these awards? Well, they are THE awards in the youth library world. If you work in a library and have anything to do with children, these are the books to know. But also, I love that they reinvigorate my enthusiasm for kid lit annually at a rather low point in the year. There are always, despite my best efforts to have read every winner and honor book ahead of time, books that are completely new to me. That means I have a whole list of books to discover, read, and analyze. January gold!

Do I love every book that wins? Do I always agree with the choices? Of course not. I have a particularly rocky relationship with the Newbery Medal which I feel is sometimes awarded to books with adult intellectual appeal rather than books that actual children will appreciate, and I’m still seething for a very particular (one word) reason about a book winning the Newbery years ago. Whether or not I actually *like* the books that win any of the awards isn’t really the point though.

The joy is reading these particular books and trying to figure out why a committee of theoretically very smart people thought they are deserving.

BUT. Enough chat.

HERE ARE THE 2025 WINNERS!!

Well, not ALL the winners! The below three books won the top prizes for the Caldecott Medal, Newbery Medal, and Printz Award (l to r). You can see ALL of the winners, of all the (many, many) awards, at this Book Riot piece where they have links to all of the books already, unlike the ALA press release.