A special section celebrating the first ten years of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature headlines the September 2014 issue of World Literature Today, with contributions by all six past NSK laureates:

• In an essay called “Tapped on the Shoulder,” Mildred D. Taylor, in the midst of writing her final novel (a conclusion to the Logan story), pauses to look back on her writing career and on the significance of winning the first NSK Prize in 2003.
• In “Over the Last Good While,” Brian Doyle—laureate of the 2005 prize—takes a characteristically humorous look at his efforts to conserve memory for future generations by recording his life and times in writing.
• In an essay called “Neustadt Memories,” Katherine Paterson writes that, while deeply grateful for winning the NSK Prize, she treasures most the people she and her husband encountered when they visited the University of Oklahoma in 2007.
• In lieu of a prose retrospective, Vera B. Williams submitted a delightful poem called “Bronx Doggerel” along with a gallery of original illustrations, plus a note on the Bronx as a rich source for her literary imagination.
• In a wry self-interview called “To Be of Use,” 2011 laureate Virginia Euwer Wolff celebrates those “moments of witness that we cheer and promote, the presences we bless with our attention.”
• And in “How Would the World Be Different?”, Naomi Shihab Nye relates a priceless anecdote about meeting a high school student in Qatar for whom writing represents “secret diplomacy.”

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