Book awards are a common way to recognize and acknowledge the best books each year in respective categories. What about disability books? How do these books that detail the disability experience get recognized? That’s where the Schneider Family Book Award comes in.
Kathie Schneider, who is blind, grew up with a love of literature, reading anything from the Library for the Blind that she could get her hands on. “To be here among librarians who daily enrich peoples’ lives with information in printed, audio and electronic formats is a dream come true,” Kathie Schneider says in the foreword of the Schneider Family Book Award manual. Now a retired clinical psychologist after 30 years of practice, she wanted to honor those authors who captured the intricacies of living with a disability in their books. Thus, the Schneider Family Book Award was born.
Honoring the Disability Experience
Since its inception in 2003, three books are selected for this award annually by a committee comprised of seven American Library Association (ALA) members with various areas of expertise, but with the common experience of knowledge of what it is like to be living with a disability. An award is given to three books, each representing a different age group: young children, middle grades, and teens.
The criteria for winning the award are extensive. Firstly, the book must have a protagonist or secondary main character who is dealing with an emotional, mental, or physical disability. The disability should be portrayed in such a way that isn’t stereotypical, overbearing, or pitiable. The character with a disability should be shown to live a full life in a realistic fashion.
The $5000 award is presented to the winners in June each year. The deadline to apply for the award is December 1st. Click for more information on applying for the Schneider Family Book Award.
