Sibert MedalFry Bread: A Native American Family StoryKevin Noble MaillardThis picture book explores fry bread as food, shape, sound, time, and history. It considers the bread’s place in Native American traditions across many tribal nations, from everyday meals to holidays, powwows, and festivals. Through sensory details and family scenes, the book also connects fry bread with Indigenous history, including displacement and stolen land.All readersView book detailsRobert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal 2020
The 2020 Sibert Medal recognizes Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story as its winner, alongside 4 Honor books. Presented by the Association for Library Service to Children, the award recognizes distinguished informational books for children through age fourteen. This annual group offers nonfiction choices for young readers, with attention to the presentation of facts through writing, illustration, organization, and supporting material.
2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal and Honor BooksSee the original list
Selections5
Published byAssociation for Library Service to Children (ALA)
SectionsAll readers
All readers
5 selections
Sibert MedalFry Bread: A Native American Family StoryKevin Noble MaillardThis picture book explores fry bread as food, shape, sound, time, and history. It considers the bread’s place in Native American traditions across many tribal nations, from everyday meals to holidays, powwows, and festivals. Through sensory details and family scenes, the book also connects fry bread with Indigenous history, including displacement and stolen land.All readersView book details
Sibert Honor BookAll in a Drop: How Antony van Leeuwenhoek Discovered an Invisible WorldLori Alexander, illustrated by Vivien Mildenberger Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Books for Young ReadersThis chapter-book biography follows self-taught scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek as he builds a powerful microscope and becomes the first person to observe microbial life. It explains that microbes occur in soil, oceans, snow, and human bodies, revealing an often unseen living world. The book also describes how van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope enlarged that world to an extraordinary scale and expanded scientific understanding.All readersView book details
Sibert Honor BookThis Promise of Change: One Girl's Story in the Fight for School EqualityJo Ann Allen Boyce, Debbie LevyIn 1956, fourteen-year-old Jo Ann Allen is one of twelve Black students integrating Clinton High School in Tennessee. Her present-tense account combines poems in her voice with news clippings and other documents from the 1956–57 school year. The early days are tense but quiet until outsiders foster protests and violence. Jo Ann and her classmates face daily harassment, while threats spread through the wider Black community. Soldiers arrive to maintain peace, and families must weigh their safety against the struggle for equal education. An afterword follows the twelve students’ later lives.All readersView book details
Sibert Honor BookOrdinary Hazards: A MemoirNikki GrimesIn this poetry memoir, Nikki Grimes recounts an unstable childhood and adolescence while tracing her growing connection to writing. Neglect and her mother’s schizophrenia led to foster care and separation from her older sister. After finding belonging with a foster family, she was returned to her mother and later experienced sexual assault by her stepfather. Her father offered support, a home, and exposure to Black cultural life. With help from her sister and an English teacher, Grimes learned to rely on herself and continued filling notebooks with words.All readersView book details
Sibert Honor BookHey, Water!Antoinette PortisA brown-skinned girl addresses water directly as she notices it in many parts of her daily life and the natural world. She encounters it through a faucet, sprinkler, and shower, as well as in the ocean, lakes, pools, and puddles. Rain, snow, fog, dew, icebergs, and tears extend the book’s look at water’s changing forms and experiences. Closing pages add information about the water cycle, forms of water, and conserving it.All readersLexile Text Measure AD410LATOS Book Level 2View book details