Phillip Hoose was presented with the 2018 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Book Award for his full body of work in a ceremony in Washington, DC.

The Children’s Book Guild of DC is a professional organization of authors, illustrators and children’s literature specialists promoting high standards in children’s literature since 1945.

Here is the text of his introduction given by longtime colleague, Kirsten Cappy of Curious City.

What a time to be celebrating the work of Phillip Hoose.
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In the last month 100,000’s of people took to the streets and walked out of school buildings at the call of youth. A few months ago, many could not imagine that we would march behind 17-year-olds, that 17-year-olds would be braver than we are, or that 17-year-olds would demand a better world – with specifics.
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A few months ago we would be imagine brilliant teenagers being maligned by politicians and members of the media, and, perhaps worse, dismissed for their ability and right to speak out.
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Well, Phil Hoose imagined it, sought it out, and wrote about it. Starting with the 1999 publication of It’s Our World Too: Young People Making a Difference, Phil has sought out and lifted the voices of youth activists.
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He sat in a diner in the Bronx across from Claudette Colvin and drew out the story that so few had heard. This quiet woman who had spent her life as a nurse’s aid was the girl who at age 14 refused to give up her bus seat 9 months before Rosa Parks did. This was the girl mocked by her peers for her activism and sidelined by the larger movement. Claudette was the girl that boldly testified in federal court and brought transportation segregation to its knees.
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Phil Hoose sat knee to knee in the crowded art gallery office of Knud Pedersen in Denmark as he recounted how he, his brother, and a group of middle school-aged classmates resisted and sabotaged the Nazi’s occupation of Denmark. They taunted and sidelined the Nazis while the rest of the country simply coped with what they thought was inevitable. Knud was the boy who went to prison as a teenager just barely escaping the firing squad…the boy who shamed Denmark out of their complacency.
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Those conversations with Claudette and Knud were intimate, empathetic, and with Claudette, continue to this day. Sadly, the world lost Knud just months before the publication of The Boys Who Challenged Hitler.
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The path for Phil Hoose’s award-winning youth non-fiction career started when a 6th grader challenged him to find any reference to kids in US school textbooks -any evidence that their voice mattered. Phil would go on to write that “text book,” We Were There Too! Young People in US History, documenting the enormous contribution young people have made to U.S. history.
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In this funny business of ours, even a National Book Award winner has a day job. Phil worked for 37 years for the Nature Conservancy, preserving essential habit. He says in his book Moonbird, “To live on an earth without fascinating, often beautiful creatures would be to live on a lesser earth. The trick is not to let them slip away, but to understand and help them on their terms.”
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Phil’s very first book for children celebrated a beautiful creature – the ant. After discovering his younger daughter Ruby indiscriminately squishing ants, Phil and his older daughter Hannah started a conversation on why we kill ants and whether we should. That conversation become a song and then a picture book that has sold close to a million copies. What is the brilliance of this book? It invites every reader to the conversation of “To squish or not to squish” while not giving an answer of its own.
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Phil went on to make readers mourn deeply for the fate of the magnificent ivory billed woodpecker lost to extinction in his book The Race to Save the Lord God Bird. He led readers to cheer to the incredible resiliency and precarious future of a rufa red knot dubbed B95 in Moonbird.
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Phil Hoose has created an unprecedented legacy of environmental stewardship, of treating youth as our equals (and oft times as our betters), and of inspiring youth to voice and act upon their innate sense of justice.
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There are 1000’s of other young people like Emma Gonzalez ready to say what Claudette Colvin said to Phil Hoose, “I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right'”.