MidWinter ALA San Diego Roundup

Posted by Cinco Puntos Press January 20, 2011

MidWinter ALA San Diego Roundup

CPP was proud to share a booth with Theatre Communications Group

Here we are with good friend Terry Nemuth, Publisher

Forgive how we look. We'd been on the concrete for three days.

Oh, wow, we came back from the Mid-Winter ALA in San Diego with good news, good memories and good feelings for the year in front of us. We hosted J.L. (aka Jessica) Powers whose new YA novel This Thing Called the Future we will be publishing in April; and the Mexican (Tijuana) artist Esau Andrade, the illustrator for Ben Saenz' Perfect Season for Dreaming. All of us had great talks with wonderful librarians. We also talked to distributors and other publishers, we ate good food and marveled at the San Diego Bay and we took copious notes of things to do in the year ahead. And we came home with some very good news, which may be old news to many of our fans, especially to those who get our emails--Cinco Puntos Press books received two prestigious awards:

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Saenz was honored by being named one of the Top Ten Books for Young Adults by the YALSA Committee; and Tim Tingle's Saltypie, A Choctaw Journey from Darkness into Light was honored as a ALSC Notable Book for Non-Fiction. Congratulations to both Ben and Tim and to Karen Clarkson, the wonderful illustrator of Saltypie.

Of course, we're never 100% happy. We expected the graphic novel collaboration Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush (Luis Alberto Urrea and Christopher Cardinale) to receive equivalent recognition from the Graphic Novel committee. Already Kirkus Reviews had listed it in its 2010 Top Ten List of Graphic Novels, and it had been glowingly reviewed from Kirkus, PW, Library Journal and others, but, alas, the committee went in other directions. They had their own druthers. Oh well. The publishing animal, although luminous, is a peculiar and diverse beast. But we wouldn't trade Mr. Mendoza for the others. It's a remarkable and important graphic novel, the product of two wonderful artists.

Here are some more photographs.