September is here and with the close of summer comes the close of our New Voices Award submissions window on September 30, 2017. It’s also a time when those who have submitted manuscripts—and those still in the process of doing so—may be grappling with some personal questions:
Should I submit my story if I’ve never written for children before?
I’ve always been an artist, but can I be a writer?
What happens to the winner and honor after the award?
Where can I find good advice from someone with experience?
These questions and others like them are not easily addressed in a FAQ page. So to provide this year’s participants with some insight to the contest and creative process, we reached out to former New Voices Award winners, honors, and artists who faced some of these same questions not too long ago. These three accomplished storytellers have forged successful careers as children’s book authors, illustrators, and even author/illustrators. In the following interview, author Paula Yoo (Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds), illustrator Shadra Strickland (Bird and Sunday Shopping) and author/illustrator Don Tate (It Jes’ Happened) share how participating in the New Voices Award helped shape their success.
A few weeks ago we hosted our first webinar, “
New York, NY—January 23, 2017—LEE & LOW BOOKS is proud to announce that Roberto Peñas of Olathe, Kansas, is the winner of the company’s seventeenth annual New Voices Award. His manuscript, Pedro Flores: The Toymaker, is a biography of the inventor of the modern yo-yo. In the early 1900s, Flores emigrated from the Philippines to the United States, where he pursued an education and his entrepreneurial ambitions. After reading about a ball-and-string-like toy in the newspaper, Flores was reminded of a similar toy from his childhood. He redesigned the toy and named it “yo-yo” (Tagalog for “come back”). It wasn’t long before the yo-yo became a popular toy.