Colorado Book Award!

Hi all! 
Exciting news-- The Indigo Notebook won the Colorado Book Award in the YA category!!!  Yippee!

The awards ceremony was in Aspen on Friday, so Ian and Lil Dude and I made it a fun weekend excursion. We didn't know what to expect from Aspen-- I'd always associated it with rich people and movie stars-- but we discovered it was a really comfortable-feeling place where you could find reasonably-priced mac n cheese and mickey mouse pancakes (well, if you weave through the Lexuses, and go past the Prada shop...)  Lil Dude had a blast playing in the fountains and jumping over (and into) the narrow little creek-water-feature that winds through downtown.  A comedian-balloon-man made him a Little Mermaid balloon sculpture, and Silly Susan sang him The Farmer and the Dell while he banged on the bongos. Bliss!

But since this is my book blog, I'll move the focus back to the awards... I wish I had pics to share, but Ian's camera was acting weird. (It's funny, in the two previous Colorado Book Awards ceremonies I've attended, we had camera issues, too... in those cases, forgetting the camera altogether!  At least this one was a step in the right direction...)  Here is an exclusive, behind-the-scenes photo of me powdering my nose in the hotel bathroom before the event.  (Who knows what possessed Ian to take that pic...  ;)

You can sort of get the idea of the indigo dress I got on ebay (Mom, this is mostly for you, since you were asking about it...)  It's too bad the skirt part is cut off, since that's Lil Dude's favorite part-- he made me twirl around in the hotel room for a while in princess fashion (he's really into princess dresses, and feels they're best accessorized with his big plastic chainsaw and fireman hat, which, fortunately, were left at home.)

Here is the single photo we have of the actual event...

That's me in the middle... the one with three faces... To my right is Helen Thorpe, who wrote Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming to Age in America (she won in the nonfiction category!) Yay, Helen! (who is incidentally the mayor of Denver's wife, and brought their son along, too)  I've heard so many good things about this book, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

To my left in that picture are my friends Karla Oceanak and Kendra Spanjer, who won in the juveline category for Artsy-Fartsy: An Aldo Zelnick comic novel.  I just read this on the way home from Aspen as Lil Dude was (thankfully and finally) napping.  What a funny-yet-edu-ma-cational book!  Highly recommended for boys ages 8-12 everywhere, especially reluctant readers!

I was also thrilled that my friend Denise Vega won in the children's category for her beautiful book, Grandmother, Have the Angels Come? Sweet and moving and poetic, with gorgeous, colorful illustrations.

You can see the full list of winners by category here. Thank you, Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book for this honor! If you live in Colorado, you should swing by their website and see what they have going on, especially if you're a teacher.  They do loads of cool literature-related programs.

Let's see, other news... here's a pic of me and Lindsay Eland at our reading at The Tattered Cover a few weeks ago, showing off the pretty silver engraved bookmarks that the TC gave us in honor of our event.  TC is my absolute favorite giant indie bookstore ever!

If you ever get the chance to hear Lindsay read from her book Scones and Sensibility, do it!  She does such a great job reading her narrator's voice with this funny, snooty English accent... it'll put a smile on your face, guaranteed...

Twas a lovely wee crowd... here I am with an enthusiastic young reader.

That's all for now... but soon I'll be posting the winners of the Spring Contest, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I'll keep doing my happy dance... join me if you'd like! ;)

photo credit m frost

Thanks for reading!

Laura