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2016 ANNUAL CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS • ORLANDO

COGNOTES 7

Celebrating the 2016 Winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals

“My heart is in your hearts right now, and I want you to know that.”

Libraries are both safe and dangerous places. They let loose the imagination, but also store the most terrible secrets of what we have done,” said Viet Thanh Nguyen as he accepted the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer on June 25. “My library is both the heaviest and the lightest thing I own.”

Enthusiastic book lovers, including authors, editors, publishers, ALA leaders, and conference attendees, filled a ballroom at the Orlando Hilton for the fifth Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction celebratory program and reception. The program included presentations of the 2016 medals and accompanying $5,000 checks. The winning titles – Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, which won for nonfiction – had been announced at the Midwinter Meeting in January.

ALA President Sari Feldman introduced the event, reminding the audience that reading is critical for fighting intolerance, and thanking her fellow librarians and book lovers for “all you do to generate enthusiasm around good literature, to encourage us to be a nation of readers, and for helping people find books that entertain, inform, and transform.”

The program kicked off with what featured speaker and 2001-2003 U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins described as “some poems interspersed with a keynote.” Introduced by Booklist Adult Books Editor Donna Seaman, he commented that she might be the only person who ever read his books from start to finish. “Poetry is a bird, prose is a potato,” he said, adding, “Poetry is the displacement of silence. Prose is the continuation of noise.” Between the poems to which he treated the audience, including one exemplifying his non-rhyming poetry and humor called “The Rain in Portugal,” he talked about being a friend of the book and about writing (how do fiction writers manage to fill entire pages with words?), showing how he earned the title “most popular poet in America” from the New York Times.

Sally Mann’s longtime editor Michael Sand accepted the medal and offered moving remarks on her behalf. Mann had been thrilled and grateful to win and had eagerly looked forward to attending, but the sudden death of her son forced her to withdraw. She was forthright about her grief in the poignant letter she wrote for Sand to read at the event: “My heart is in your hearts right now, and I want you to know that.” She would have liked to have attended to spread some “Appalachian love” and commented on her disappointment that Sand would not be able to deliver her words with the right accent. Her hope had also been to talk about her mother’s triumph in getting not just a library but charming a bookmobile out of their small community’s reading-averse authorities in the 1950s. Sand spoke about their relationship as editor and writer, communicating often in acronyms, and ended his remarks with “TYVMFTA:” Thank you very much for this award.

“An award magnet” was how Seaman described The Sympathizer, which also won (among others) the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, reminding the audience that the Carnegie Medal had come first. Nguyen expressed deep appreciation for libraries and the award. His decision to master English as a young refugee was both a way of belonging to America and his first step to becoming a writer. The second step was making a home in the San José Public Library, where he came to understand that books offered both magic and menace, and that people like him were absent both as authors and within the pages of books. He discovered that there was a history of exclusion and that he was not alone, and hoped that, “if I could find a place on that shelf, I could find a place for my parents too.” For him, writing needed to be an act of justice, a journey into his own interior to engage with his own monsters, with no leaning on the “crutches of sentimentality.” He thanked librarians for all their labors in safeguarding a place for the imagination.

After the program, attendees had a chance to mingle over dessert and drinks and to chat with Collins and Nguyen for another hour.

NoveList was welcomed as generous lead sponsor of the 2016 event. Duncan Smith, founder and general manager of NoveList, spoke of how reading supports individuals “from conception to resurrection,” and, like Feldman, alluded to the importance of reading in helping make us a more open-minded society.

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. They have rapidly gained widespread recognition in both library and mainstream media; last year, the ALA Public Awareness Office captured more than 451,000 web pickups in addition to other media related to the awards.

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