Sincere thanks to Elizabeth George Speare for the gripping setting in Galilee of a Jewish teenager’s drive for revenge against the Romans in The Bronze Bow (1962); to Elizabeth Borton de Tevino for the title character in I, Juan de Pareja, 1966) for exceptional humanity; to Paula Fox for Jessie,  a poor boy who was kidnapped and forced to work on a slave ship to and from Africa, in Slave Dancer (1974); to Jean Lee Latham for Nate Bowditch, a sailor and astounding mathematician in Carry On Mr. Bowditch (1956); to Irene Hunt for her honest story of a girl, Julie, growing up with a talented, strict aunt, in Up A Road Slowly (1967); to Virginia Hamilton for the unusual MC Higgins the Great (1975), in which the grandson of an escaped slave dealt with family rules and odd neighbors; to Cynthia Voigt for the struggles of a girl and her siblings living with their grandmother after the mother had a breakdown, in Dicey’s Song (1983); to Sid Fleischman for the outlandish trials of a street urchin and a spoiled prince in The Whipping Boy (1987); and to Jerry Spinelli for bringing resilient orphan boy Maniac Magee (1991) to life.

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