ALA Youth Media Awards 2023 - Young Adults

Created on January 31, 2023, 10:42 am

Last Updated February 22, 2023, 11:10 am

Each year the American Library Association (ALA) honors books, audiobooks, and other outstanding materials for children and Young Adults. Recognized worldwide for the high quality they represent, the ALA Youth Media Awards guide parents, educators, librarians, and others in selecting the best materials for youth. Selected by committees composed of librarians and other literature and media experts, the awards encourage original and creative work in the field of children’s and young adult literature and media. This list includes awards such as the prestigious Printz, Morris, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpré, Asian/Pacific American, Sydney Taylor, Schneider Family, Stonewall, YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for YA, and Alex book awards. www.ala.org/yma

1) Ain't burned all the bright

Author

Reynolds, Jason

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"A smash up of art and text that viscerally captures what it means to not be able to breathe, and how the people and things you love most are actually the oxygen you most need"--

2) Victory. Stand!: raising my fist for justice

Author

Description

"A groundbreaking and timely graphic memoir from one of the most iconic figures in American sports-and a tribute to his fight for civil rights. On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans....

3) We deserve monuments

Author

Description

"When seventeen-year-old Avery moves to rural Georgia to live with her ailing grandmother, she encounters decades-old family secrets and a mystery surrounding the town's racist past"--

4) Burn down, rise up

Author

Tirado, Vincent

Formats:

Description

When an urban legend rumored to trap people inside subway tunnels seems to be behind mysterious disappearances in the Bronx, sixteen-year-old Raquel and her friends team up to save their city--and confront a dark episode in its history in the process.

5) Breathe and count back from ten

Author

Sylvester, Natalia

Formats:

Book - New (14 Days), Playaway

Description

"Ver̤nica has had many surgeries to manage her disability. The best form of rehabilitation is swimming, so she spends hours in the pool, but not just to strengthen her body. Her Florida town is home to Mermaid Cove, a kitschy underwater attraction where professional mermaids perform in giant tanks . . . and Ver̤nica wants to audition. But her conservative Peruvian parents would never go for it. And they definitely would never let her be with Alex,...

6) High spirits: short stories on Dominican diaspora

Author

Gomera-Tavarez, Camille

Formats:

Description

"A collection of eleven interconnected short stories from the Dominican diaspora from debut author Camille Gomera-Tavarez. It is a book centered on one extended family--the Beléns--across multiple generations, ... set in the fictional small town of Hidalpa--and Santo Domingo and Paterson and San Juan and Washington Heights, too ... Told in a style both utterly real and distinctly magical, ... its stories explore machismo, mental health, family, and...

7) Buenos espíritus: (High Spirits)

Author

Gomera-Tavarez, Camille

Description

★ "Auténtico e inmersivo... Una obra de amor" -Kirkus (reseña estelar) ★"El debut literario conmovedor de Gomera-Tavarez es una obra sensible e intrínsecamente feminista."; -Publishers Weekly (reseña estelar) Buenos Espíritus es una colección de once cuentos, interconectados con la diáspora dominicana, de la autora debut Camille Gomera-Tavarez. Es un libro centrado en una familia extensa, los Belén, a través de múltiples generaciones. Está...

8) The lesbiana's guide to Catholic school

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

Sixteen-year-old Mexican American Yami Flores starts Catholic school, determined to keep her brother out of trouble and keep herself closeted, but her priorities shift when Yami discovers that her openly gay classmate Bo is also annoyingly cute.

9) Himawari House

Author

Becker, Harmony

Description

"When Nao returns to Tokyo to reconnect with her Japanese heritage, she books a yearlong stay at the Himawari sharehouse. There she meets Hyejung and Tina, two other girls who came to Japan to freely forge their own paths. The trio live together, share meals, and even attend the same Japanese-language school, which results in them becoming fast friends. But will they be able to hold one another up as life tests them with new loves, old heart breaks,...

10) The silence that binds us

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

In the year following their son's death, May Chen's parents face racist accusations of putting too much pressure on their son and causing his death by suicide, and May attempts to challenge the racism and ugly stereotypes through her writing, only to realize that she still has a lot to learn and that her actions have consequences for her family as well as herself.

11) When the angels left the old country

Author

Formats:

Description

"Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young people, Essie, goes missing. Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way...

12) My fine fellow: a delicious entanglement

Author

Cohen, Jennieke

Description

It's 1830s England, and Culinarians--doyens who consult with society's elite to create gorgeous food and confections--are the crème de la crème of high society. Helena Higgins, top of her class at the Royal Academy, has a sharp demeanor and an even sharper palate--and knows stardom awaits her if she can produce greatness in her final year. Penelope Pickering is going to prove the value of non-European cuisine to all of England. Her contemporaries...

13) The words we keep

Author

Description

When sixteen-year-old Lily Larkin's older sister, Alice, begins to struggle with her mental health, Lily attempts to keep everything together and perfect, despite her own growing anxiety.

14) I kissed Shara Wheeler: a novel

Author

McQuiston, Casey

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Playaway

Description

After seventeen-year-olds Chole and Shara, Chole's rival for valedictorian, kiss, Shara vanishes leaving Chole and two boys, who are also enamored with Shara, to follow the trail of clues she left behind, but during the search, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to Shara and her small Alabama town than she thought.

15) The summer of bitter and sweet

Author

Ferguson, Jenny

Description

"Lou has enough confusion in front of her this summer. She'll be working in her family's ice-cream shack with her newly ex-boyfriend--whose kisses never made her feel desire, only discomfort--and her former best friend King, who is back in their Canadian prairie town after disappearing three years ago without a word. But when she gets a letter from her biological father--a man she hoped would stay behind bars for the rest of his life--Lou immediately...

16) All my rage

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Playaway

Description

Lahore, Pakistan. Then. Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start. Juniper, California. Now. Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else...

Author

Graziadei, A. L

Description

Mickey James III is following in his father's (and grandfather's) skates by playing hockey at Hartland University, but he is not enjoying the situation: for one thing he is seriously depressed, unsure of anything, even whether he can make it as a hockey player (or wants to); more troubling his rival, Jaysen Caulfield, is also on the team and seems to bitterly resent him--and Mickey actually finds Jaysen very attractive and does not know how to deal...

18) The life and crimes of Hoodie Rosen

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. He's got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren't happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in at once, but that's not Hoodie's problem. That is, until he meets...

19) Wake the bones

Author

Kilcoyne, Elizabeth

Description

After dropping out of college, nineteen-year-old Laurel Early returns to her uncle's tobacco farm, where she encounters a monster as well as her mother's ghost, and soon Laureal realizes that she must tap into her own innate magic to save everyone she loves.

20) Hell followed with us

Author

White, Andrew Joseph

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him--the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world's population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can't get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with. But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately...