Carnegie Medals for Excellence Ceremony and Reception

The Andrew Carnegie Medals were established in 2012 by ALA and Carnegie Corporation of New York and are cosponsored and administered by Booklist and RUSA.

You always have my back,” Colson Whitehead told an enthusiastic audience as he accepted the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his novel, The Underground Railroad on June 24.

Whitehead went on to explain that no matter how seemingly random his jumps have been from genre to genre – coming-of-age fiction to a memoir about poker, to a horror novel about the zombie apocalypse – librarians have unfailingly found the right readers for his various books. The crowd of librarians, authors, editors, publishers, and ALA leaders filled 350 seats in the Chicago Hilton’s Grand Ballroom for the sixth annual celebration of the Carnegie Medals.

The medal winners – Whitehead and Matthew Desmond, whose Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, won for nonfiction – were announced in January at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting. Both authors joined featured speaker, acclaimed mystery author Sara Paretsky, for an evening of inspirational speeches extolling the winning titles and the value of reading. After being introduced by Donna Seaman, Adult Books Editor at Booklist and the 2017 chair of the Carnegie selection committee, Paretsky offered a stirring tribute both to the power of the written word and to librarians for their unequivocal support of liberty and free speech. “My soul is cured when I stand among books,” Paretsky said. “They give me strength for the journey. The word, which is only breath, has survived countless wars, fires, murders, dictators. How can we not believe, we in this room who have dedicated our lives to the written word, that this word will not only endure, but triumph.”

Desmond also saluted librarians, first for being the initial promoters of Evicted and then for their continuing role on the front lines of the homelessness crisis, providing not only information but also such life necessities as water and warmth to those in need. “This book has made a dent,” Desmond said about his account of the effects of eviction on families in Milwaukee, Wis. “The fight continues, and there is still a lot of work to do, but whatever the way is out of this mess, one thing is certain: this degree of inequality, this level of social suffering, this wreckage that Evicted tries to tell about, this cannot be us.”

ALA President Julie Todaro opened the evening with a salute to her fellow librarians for encouraging America to be a nation of readers. She also paid tribute to outgoing ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels for his pivotal role in launching the Andrew Carnegie Medals with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Duncan Smith, founder and general manager of NoveList, lead sponsor of the event, also added to the evening’s celebration of literature by noting that “Stories are never owned by their authors, their publishers or their readers alone. They are essential components of the communities that form around them.”

The Andrew Carnegie Medals were established in 2012 by ALA and Carnegie Corporation of New York and are cosponsored and administered by Booklist and RUSA. The have rapidly gained widespread recognition in both library and mainstream media.