Annal:2008 Golden Kite Picture Book Text Award

A Visitor for Bear

Bonny Becker, Kady MacDonald Denton

• 2008 Golden Kite-picturebook winner
• Score: 10.58

Cheery persistence wears down a curmudgeonly bear in a wry comedy of manners that ends in a most unlikely friendship.

Bear is quite sure he doesn’t like visitors. He even has a sign. So when a mouse taps on his door one day, Bear tells him to leave. But when Bear goes to the cupboard to get a bowl, there is the mouse—small and gray and bright-eyed. In this slapstick tale that begs to be read aloud, all Bear wants is to eat his breakfast in peace, but the mouse—who keeps popping up in the most unexpected places—just won’t go away!

Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane

Carole Boston Weatherford, Sean Qualls

• 2009 CS King-Illustrator honor
• 2008 Golden Kite-picturebook honor
• Score: 12.59

Young John Coltrane was all ears. And there was a lot to hear growing up in the South in the 1930s: preachers praying, music on the radio, the bustling of the household. These vivid noises shaped John’s own sound as a musician. Carole Boston Weatherford and Sean Qualls have composed an amazingly  rich hymn to the childhood of jazz legend John Coltrane.