Week 4 Reading Responses: YA Awards

This week in my YA class, colleagues of mine will be presenting a seminar on "Awards and Competitions for YA Material." We were assigned to read two articles: one of the prestigious Printz Award, and the other on the blogger-run Cybils award, but I will be focusing on the former.

The article, "A New Literature For a New Millenium? The First Decade of the Printz Awards" is an overall look at the winning and honour titles for the Printz Award, an award given to books that are not necessarily popular, but fulfill the award committee's requirements of "literary merit." I take some issue with this stipulation, or rather, the wording of it. On the one hand, I love that YA books are being recognized as having "literary merit" (whatever that is -- it is never explicitly stated in the article, though the overview of the winning and honour titles is supposed to give readers an idea of what this entails); I'm tired of telling people I read YA and they think that I'm merely reading "easy" literature. I'd like to play The Book Thief in their hands and see how "easy" YA is.

On the other hand though, this stamp of "literary merit" has an elitist undercurrent to it that rubs me the wrong way. It's like saying "if you don't read these books, you're not reading 'real' YA literature", and I wouldn't be surprised if this is alienating to some readers of YA (whether they be young adult or not.) Perhaps the Printz committee has more strict guidelines as to what "literary merit" is, but in my experience, I know this can mean different things for different people -- I wonder if this is a problem for the committee at all.

With all this said, I don't want anyone to think that I think the Printz Award is bad. I actually love the award and have discovered  many amazing titles because of it. I wish there was a way to outline that it's a prestigious award without using the words "literary merit" (though I don't have any ideas of my own. Anyone have any thoughts on this?)