2016 Jefferson Cup Winners and Honor Books

Audacity and Blue Birds win 2016 Jefferson Cup

The 2016 Jefferson Cup Committee is pleased to announce its selections for this year’s awards. The 2016 Jefferson Cup Award winner for Young Adult Readers is Melanie Crowder for Audacity. The 2016 Jefferson Cup Award winner for Young Readers is Caroline Starr Rose for Blue Birds.

Set during the Progressive Era, Audacity is a free verse celebration of Clara Leinlich and her determination to improve women’s rights in the workplace. Clara is best known for a speech that incited 20,000 women to strike for better working conditions in the garment factories.

Blue Birds is a beautifully descriptive novel in verse, which explores the relationship between an English child and a Native American child. Set in 1587, this fictional account of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island redefines family and notions of right and wrong.

Honor Books

Diary of a waitress: The Not so Glamorous Life of a Harvey Girl by Carolyn Meyer, Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez, These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly, and Walk on Earth a Stranger by Rae Carson were chosen as honor books for young adult readers.

Gingerbread for Liberty!: How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution by Mara Rockcliff, Like a river: A Civil War Novel by Kathy Cannon Wiechman, Night on Fire by Ronald Kidd, and Sitting Bull: Lakota Warrior and Defender of His People by S. D. Nelson were chosen as honor books for young readers. Kid Legends (Quirk Productions, Inc.) and Women Who Broke the Rules (Bloomsbury) both received the Series Worthy of Note designation for young readers, due to their appealing formats, engaging information and the ease with which young readers may identify with their chosen subjects.

About the Jefferson Cup

The Jefferson Cup honors a distinguished biography, historical fiction or American history book for young people. Presented since 1983, the Jefferson Cup Committee’s goal is to promote reading about America’s past; to encourage the quality writing of United States history, biography and historical fiction for young people and to recognize authors in these disciplines.

The committee has nine members: a chairperson (selected by the previous year’s committee), one person from each Virginia Library Association region (total of six persons) selected by the current chair, the chair of the previous year’s Jefferson Cup Committee, and the chairperson or outgoing chairperson of the Youth Services Forum. All committee members are members of VLA. To learn more about the committee, visit the Jefferson Cup Committee page.