Americas Award Books

The Américas Award is named for the hemisphere it covers rather than for a person. The Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs — CLASP, an association of university Latin American studies centers — founded it in 1993 to commend authors, illustrators, and publishers of children's and young adult books that portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States, and to give teachers something concrete to work from. Eligible titles are published in the United States or Puerto Rico and may be fiction, poetry, folklore, nonfiction, or translation.

Judging weighs literary quality, cultural contextualization, the integration of text, illustration, and design, and potential for classroom use — an unusual fourth criterion that makes the result behave less like a prize and more like a vetted collection. Up to two awards are given a year, with honor books and a substantially longer commended list behind them, and the commended list is the practical part: it is where a teacher building a unit, or a parent looking for a book set in a particular country rather than on a generic Latino shelf, will find enough titles to actually choose among.

Information from the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs.