Shining the Spotlight: 28 Days Later 2014 Honorees

Today, we are proud to announce the honorees for our seventh annual 28 Days Later campaign, a Black History Month celebration of emerging and established children’s book creators of color. As is tradition, a stand-out author or illustrator will be saluted each day during February. 

The month-long submissions window for our campaign opened in October. Wonderful suggestions from librarians, teachers, publishers and kidlit lovers flowed in. We considered those names along with internal nominations and nominees from past years, keeping focused on our mission to “push awareness of the myriad of African American voices writing for young readers.”

The campaign will begin on February 1, 2014, and we will honor 28 children’s book creators in all – 22 authors and six illustrators.

The authors and the day they will be featured are as follows:

Vanguard authors/illustrators in bold.

1. Ilyasah Shabazz

2. Colin Bootman 

3. Octavia Spencer

4. Jason Reynolds

5. Linda Trice

6. Michele Wood

7. Zetta Elliott

8. Lamar Giles

9. Pamela Tuck

10. Eric Shabazz Larkin

11. Camille Yarbrough

12. Dream Jordan

13. Daniel Beaty

14. Theodore Taylor

15. Tiki Barber and Ronde Barber

16. Kelli London

17, Nikki Shannon Smith

 18. Christopher Myers

19. Diane Browne

20. Kimberly Reid

 21. Gwendolyn Battle-Lavert 

22. Amar’e Stoudemire

23. Stephanie Kuehn

24. Trish Cooke

25. Celeste O. Norfleet

26. Kadir Nelson

27. S.A.M. Posey

28. Higgins Bond

Congratulations to the honorees!