Youth Media Award-Winning Books 2025

Created on January 29, 2025, 10:17 am

Last Updated February 3, 2025, 4:12 pm

The library has a large collection of 2025 award winning books including the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal, Coretta Scott King Awards, Schneider Family Book Award, ALSC Children's Literature Lecture, Children's Literature Legacy Award, Margaret A. Edwards Award, Mildred L. Batchelder Award, Odyssey Award, Pura Belpré Awards, Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award, Stonewall Book Awards, Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, The Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the Sydney Taylor Book Award.

1) The first state of being

Author

Kelly, Erin Entrada

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

When Ridge, a time-traveling teenager from the future, gets trapped in 1999, he befriends Michael, a lonely twelve-year-old boy, changing the course of their lives forever.

2) Across so many seas

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

"Spanning over five hundred years, a novel telling the stories of four girls from different generations of a Jewish family, many of them forced to leave their country and start a new life"-- Provided by publisher.

3) Magnolia Wu unfolds it all

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

A self-proclaimed sock detective inside her parents' New York City laundromat, 10-year-old Magnolia Wu and Iris, a new friend from California, set off across the city to solve the mystery of each missing sock, meeting people and uncovering the unimaginable along the way.

4) One big open sky

Author

Cline-Ransome, Lesa

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

"In the 1870s, a Black family undertakes a perilous wagon journey westward for a tenuous shot at freedom in Nebraska"-- Provided by publisher.

5) The wrong way home

Author

O'Shaughnessy, Kate

Description

When twelve-year-old Fern and her mother abruptly leave their isolated, off-the-grid community, Fern wants nothing more than to return, but things get murky as she slowly adjusts to her new life and discovers unsettling truths about her old one.

6) Chooch Helped

Author

Rogers, Andrea L./ Kunz, Rebecca Lee (ILT)

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

WINNER OF THE CALDECOTT MEDAL! A Cherokee girl introduces her younger brother to their family's traditions—begrudgingly!—in a heartfelt picture book full of gorgeous collage illustrations from debut artist Rebecca Lee Kunz.

Sissy's younger brother Chooch isn't a baby anymore. They just celebrated his second birthday, after all. But no matter what Chooch does—even if he's messing something up! Which

...

7) Home in a lunchbox

Author

Description

After moving to America from Hong Kong, Jun feels isolated at her new school but discovers a sense of home in the familiar foods and flavors she finds in her lunchbox.

8) My daddy is a cowboy

Author

Seales, Stephanie

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

While a young Panamanian American girl and her father share "just-us" time on an early morning horseback ride around their town, he tells her cowboy stories and she realizes she is a cowboy too.

9) Up, up, ever up!: Junko Tabei : a life in the mountains

Author

Description

This exhilarating picture book biography about the first woman to summit Mount Everest follows Junko Tabei who, despite many obstacles, climbed step by step to reach her goal and then took on a new challenge: protecting the wild spaces she loved for future generations.

Author

Alexander, Kwame

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

Twelve-year old Black girl Charley, who dreams of becoming the first professional female pitcher, must navigate adolescence during the turbulent segregation era and the beginning of the Great Migration.

11) Everywhere beauty is Harlem: the vision of photographer Roy DeCarava

Author

Description

"This visually stunning portrait of Black photographer Roy DeCarava, a child of the Harlem Renaissance and an artistic collaborator of Langston Hughes, takes readers through 1940s Harlem where beauty is everywhere as he immortalizes and documents the lives of ordinary Black people. Simultaneous eBook. Illustrations."-- Provided by publisher.

12) Go forth and tell: the life of Augusta Baker, librarian and master storyteller

Author

McDaniel, Breanna J

Description

"A luminous picture book biography about librarian and storyteller Augusta Baker, the first Black coordinator of children's services at all branches of the New York Public library"-- Provided by publisher. "Before Augusta Braxton Baker became a storyteller, she was an excellent story listener. Her grandmother brought stories like Br'er Rabbit and Arthur and Excalibur to life, teaching young Augusta that where there's a will, there's always a way....

13) Monster hands

Author

Description

"One night, just before bedtime... Milo read a book about a monster under the bed. Milo should not have read that book. Monsters under the bed are scary, but luckily, Milo's best friend, Mel, knows just what to do--scare the monster more than the monster scares you!"--P. [2] of jacket.

14) You're so amazing!

Author

Catchpole, James

Description

When people meet Joe, they often treat him as Amazing Joe or Poor Joe. But can't he just be . . . Joe? One-legged Joe is 'amazing'. He knows this because wherever he goes people always tell him he's amazing. Amazing for sliding down the slide, for kicking a ball . . . even walking to get an ice cream, or even just eating an ice cream. Of course, being Amazing Joe is better than being Poor Joe . . . A groundbreaking picture book which explores how...

15) Louder than hunger

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune, and reading mysteries and comics aloud to his teachers. He also likes avoiding people his own age . . . and the cruelty of mirrors . . . and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books -- the weird one, the outsider -- and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less...

16) Sisters of the Neversea

Author

Smith, Cynthia Leitich

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

In this magical, modern twist on Peter Pan, stepsisters Lily and Wendy are spirited away to Neverland by a mysterious boy and must find a way back to the family they love.

17) Rain is not my Indian name

Author

Smith, Cynthia Leitich

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Cassidy Rain Berghoff didn't know that the very night she decided to get a life would be the night that Galen would lose his. It's been six months since her best friend died, and up until now Rain has succeeded in shutting herself off from the world. But when controversy arises around her aunt Georgia's Indian Camp in their mostly white Midwestern community, Rain decides to face the outside world again -- at least through the lens of her camera. Hired...

18) Indian shoes

Author

Smith, Cynthia Leitich

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

Together with Grampa, Ray Halfmoon, a Seminole-Cherokee boy, finds creative and amusing solutions to life's challenges.

19) Holler Loudly

Author

Smith, Cynthia Leitich

Description

Unable to be quiet since he was born, Holler Loudly only gets louder as he grows up which gets him in trouble at school, the library, and the movie theater, but when a tornado threatens the state fair, Holler's voice may save the day.

20) Jingle dancer

Author

Smith, Cynthia Leitich

Description

Jenna, a member of the Muscogee, or Creek, Nation, borrows jingles from the dresses of several friends and relatives so that she can perform the jingle dance at the powwow. Includes a note about the jingle dance tradition and its regalia.