NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature Past Laureates
2011	2009	2007	2005	2003
Virginia Euwer Wolff	Vera B. Williams	Katherine Paterson	Brian Doyle	Mildred D. Taylor

Vera B. Williams—The 2009 NSK Laureate

Vera B. Williams, 2009 NSK Laureate
Photo by Carl Zoch

Vera B. Williams Wins 2009 NSK Neustadt Prize
for Children’s Literature

NORMAN, OKLA. – Vera B. Williams, the renowned U.S. author and illustrator of children’s literature, has been named laureate of the 2009 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, a $25,000 award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today, OU’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture. “Vera B. Williams deeply deserves the recognition of the prestigious NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, an announcement that will thrill children all over the world, my own included,” said Robert Con Davis-Undiano, director of World Literature Today.

Virginia Euwer Wolff, who nominated Williams for the NSK Prize, noted that “Williams has produced heartening, empathic books for children, each containing some carefully tuned surprise, in word or picture or both. She carries this playful impulse, along with her deeply ingrained social conscience, into her illustrations in watercolor, gouache, marker and colored pencil, and her books are refreshing, energetic and gentle.” The NSK Prize jury made special mention of Williams’ graphic-novel-like Scooter (1993). According to Wolff, Scooter is full of “splendidly tactile charcoal sketches that record and celebrate kids’ daily lives,” marked by a “radiant, kinetic ending growing out of the children’s unaffected brilliance as masters of play.”

Williams was born in 1927 in Hollywood, Calif., but her family moved to the Bronx, N.Y., when she was a young child. According to Williams, she comes from “a fiercely scrapping, loud-talking, loving but unsettled family struggling to make a living. We were also radicals, world meddlers, people lovers, and lovers of literature, art, and music.” Alongside her prolific career as a writer and illustrator, Williams has also raised three children, founded a school, run a bakery, made a 500-mile canoe trip on the Yukon River, worked as a community activist, and spent a month in a federal penitentiary as a result of her presence in a women’s peaceful blockade of the Pentagon.

Scooter was published in 1993.

Williams’ 16 books to date have been accorded numerous awards and honors. She has won two Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, for A Chair for My Mother (1983) and Scooter (1993), and two Caldecott Honor Awards, for A Chair for My Mother (1983) and “More More More” Said the Baby (1991). She has also received Honor Book mention for the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award twice for Music, Music for Everyone (1985) and Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart (2002). In 2004 Williams was the United States illustrator nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and her best-known work, A Chair for My Mother, was featured on the children’s television show Reading Rainbow. In 2008 she won the Regina Medal of the Catholic Library Association for her body of work.

The NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature was established by Nancy Barcelo, Susan Neustadt Schwartz and Kathy Neustadt to encourage the improvement of writing for children by honoring an accomplished contemporary writer or illustrator of children’s literature. The three sisters are members of a pioneer Oklahoma family whose support of the University of Oklahoma spans more than a half-century, beginning with a gift from their grandparents, Walter Sr. and Doris Westheimer Neustadt, that ultimately became Max Westheimer Airpark. Doris Westheimer Neustadt later provided the endowment for the world-renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature, also awarded by World Literature Today, which is widely considered to be the “American Nobel” and one of the most prestigious international literary prizes. Barcelo, Schwartz and Hankin’s parents, Walter Jr. and Dolores Neustadt, established an OU professorship to enhance the directorship of World Literature Today and add even greater distinction to the Neustadt Prize.

This is the fourth NSK Prize to be awarded, following Mildred D. Taylor (2003), Brian Doyle (2005) and Katherine Paterson (2007). Williams will be presented the $25,000 prize, a silver medallion and a certificate during official ceremonies at OU on October 23, 2009.