Laura Amy Schlitz, a school librarian in Baltimore and author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village, was wide awake when the Newbery call came. But not exactly because she had been expecting it. “I had woken up at 5 and had a stomachache,” she says, “and couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally it was 6:30, when I would have woken up anyway. I told myself, ‘OK, it’s time to be brave, the phone hasn’t rung, you have a good life, it’s time to get up and fix lunch.’ Then the phone rang.”Schlitz recalls being “thunderstruck” by the news. “I had been trying not to want one of the honors,” she says, “because I knew the chances were very slim. I don’t remember the call very well. It was some time before I remembered to stammer out ‘thank you.’ On the one hand I don’t remember the call but on the other hand I’ll remember it the rest of my life.”
Selznick and Schlitz Discuss Their Award-Winning Books – 1/17/2008 – Publishers Weekly
educating alice 