2007 CSK Winners

2007 CSK Winners

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Below are the Coretta Scott King Award Winning Books for 2007. You'll find the author award and honor books, the illustrator and illustrator honor books as well as the John Steptoe New Talent Author Award winning Books. Click here for the previous year's winners.

Coretta Scott King Author Awards - 2007
Announced by the American Library Association - January 22, 2007

Coretta Scott King Author Award

Copper Sun
Click to order via Amazon
by Sharon M. Draper

Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 306 pages
Publisher: Atheneum (January 3, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0689821816

When pale strangers enter fifteen-year-old Amari's village, her entire tribe welcomes them; for in her remote part of Africa, visitors are always a cause for celebration. But these strangers are not here to celebrate. They are here to capture the strongest, healthiest villagers and to murder the rest. They are slave traders. And in the time it takes a gun to fire, Amari's life as she's known it is destroyed, along with her family and village.

Beaten, branded, and dragged onto a slave ship, Amari is forced to witness horrors worse than any nightmare and endure humiliations she had never thought possible -- including being sold to a plantation owner in the Carolinas who gives her to his sixteen-year-old son, Clay, as his birthday present.

Now, survival and escape are all Amari dreams about. As she struggles to hold on to her memories in the face of backbreaking plantation work and daily degradation at the hands of Clay, she finds friendship in unexpected places. Polly, an outspoken indentured white girl, proves not to be as hateful as she'd first seemed upon Amari's arrival, and the plantation owner's wife, despite her trappings of luxury and demons of her own, is kind to Amari. But these small comforts can't relieve Amari's feelings of hopelessness and despair, and when an opportunity to escape presents itself, Amari and Polly decide to work together to find the thing they both want most...freedom.

Grand and sweeping in scope, detailed and penetrating in its look at the complicated interrelationships of those who live together on a plantation, Copper Sun is an unflinching and unforgettable look at the African slave trade and slavery in America.

Coretta Scott King Author Honor Books

The Road to Paris
by Nikki Grimes

(published by G.P. Putnum’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)

Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award

Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom

illus. by Kadir Nelson, written by Carole Boston Weatherford (published by Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children)

Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Award

Jazz

illus. by Christopher Myers,

written by Walter Dean Myers

(published by Holiday House, Inc.)

Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes

illus. by Benny Andrews,

edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad

(published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.)

John Steptoe Award for New Talent

Traci L. Jones
Standing Against the Wind
published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux