Well, actually, what makes this award sweeter still is seeing my friend Liz Scanlon’s All the World right there above The Day-Glo Brothers on the list of this year’s winners. Congratulations to Liz and to our books’ illustrators, Marla Frazee and Tony Persiani, and to all of this year’s winners and finalists — and a huge “Thank you!” to all the Cybils panelists and judges. I hope you’re all savoring today and getting tomorrow off.

A few of my favorites have come from:

BookMoot: Sometimes it is personal
I’m afraid I may now be on the hook to pay more attention to conference-goers’ shoes than comes naturally to me.

Original Content: I Can’t Believe It! I Know Another Award Winner!
Until Gail said so, I hadn’t realized quite how long the whole name of the award is. I think I’ll stick with “Sibert Honor” so I don’t pass out in the middle of trying to get all the words out.

How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator: ALA honors for Austin authors
You read that right: All three Austin authors with ALA-honored books, plus Caldecott Honoree Marla Frazee, will be on the faculty for next Saturday’s conference.

Unabridged: ALA Midwinter in Boston
Why didn’t I think of Day-Glo cupcakes?

But my absolute favorite thing online this past week is on page 17 of last Monday’s Cognotes, the ALA’s conference newspaper. In the bottom-right photo, check out who that much-lauded lion is checking out…

The American Library Association media awards (Newbery, Caldecott, etc.) were announced today, and The Day-Glo Brothers was honored as a runner-up for the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal.

And that was great, absolutely. But it wasn’t the best part.

The best part has been hearing from so many people — by email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, blog post, and hugs and kisses (thanks, Darlin’) — who are so happy to share in this good news (and to laugh about this). Some are lifelong friends, some I met only in passing last week, and one was someone I had lost track of years ago and never expected to hear from again. Many are themselves writers and artists, and some had great news of their own to be congratulated on today, which I was only too happy to do.

The sense of community that I have cherished ever since I first realized that there was a children’s literature community has been in overdrive today. I haven’t gotten any (OK, much) work done today, but I haven’t minded a bit. Without that community, these past nine-plus years would not have been nearly as fun, and today would not have been one of the best of my life.

Thank you.

We in the kidlitosphere know that YA fiction can hold its own with fiction targeted toward adult readers, but organizers of competitions such as this one may not instinctively think to look in our direction. (Not just yet, anyway. We’re working on it.)

So, if you know of any YA authors whose 2008 titles would seem to qualify, why don’t you be sweet and kindly direct them Reba’s way?

Announcing The Willie Morris Award for Fiction
This annual award will honor the author of the best book of fiction set in the Southern United States.

The winning book should reflect, in the words of Willie Morris, “hope for belonging, for belief in a people’s better nature, for steadfastness against all that is hollow or crass or rootless or destructive.” [emphasis mine]

The winning novel will be chosen for the quality of its prose, its originality, and for authenticity of setting and characters.

The author will receive $1000, an expense paid trip to New York City, and be a featured lecturer at The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction.

The first award will celebrate a novel published in 2007, and the first lecture will take place in October, 2008.

It doesn’t say that the book must be intended for an adult audience, and so it occurs to me that surely there must be at least one YA novel from 2007 that fits the bill.

Maybe that’s just Looking for Alaska talking — I think Willie Morris would have loved the beautiful, impulsive, unknowable title character in John Green’s 2005 debut. And I think Willie Morris would have identified with narrator Miles Halter’s search for the “Great Perhaps,” which to me sounds a lot like what Morris was looking for when he left Yazoo City, Mississippi, for the University of Texas at Austin.

“Something different was stirring around in my future,” Morris wrote in North Toward Home, “and I would brood over the place where I was and some place where I would end up, and for days I carried a map of the University of Texas in my shirt pocket. I was bathing in self-drama; perhaps it was my imagination, which had never failed me even as a child, that sought some unknown awakening.”

(A bit about Willie Morris: If, like me, you’ve been even half-serious about newspaper journalism as a UT student in the past 40 years, there’s a good chance you’ve been through a “Willie Morris” period — lasting at least long enough to read North Toward Home and, in some cases, with no evident expiration date. The highlight of mine was the dinner he treated me to at Hal and Mal’s in Jackson, Mississippi, as I drove back to Austin after a spring of magazine internships in New York City.)

Anyway, a cursory search for 2007 YA and middle-grade titles yielded a few potential candidates for The Willie Morris Award –

• When I Crossed No-Bob by Margaret McMullan
• Picture Perfect by D. Anne Love
• The Baptism by Shelia P. Moses
• Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson
• My Mother the Cheerleader by Robert Sharenow

– so if you know the authors I hope you’ll tip them off to this award (and the March 1 deadline), and if you can suggest other titles in the comments here, please do.