Ebony Elizabeth Thomas wins the 2020 Children’s Literature Association’s Book Award

School of Education associate professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas will receive the 2020 ChLA Book Award for The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, published by NYU Press. (Each year the award goes to a book published two calendar years earlier.) The award will be presented at the annual ChLA conference banquet in Atlanta, Georgia this June.

Thomas’ book “makes a significant contribution to children’s literature scholarship and we are pleased to be able to honor her work with this award,” notes ChLA President, Libby Gruner. “The award recognizes outstanding book-length contributions to children's literature scholarship and criticism; in this case, the committee was united in its praise for Thomas’ book, which they called “wonderfully nuanced,” “methodologically innovative,” and “engaging, accessible, and illuminating.”