The Towner Award

Announcing the 2019 Towner Award Nominees!

This Book Isn't Safe This Is How We Do It The Youngest Marcher

Beauty and the Beak: How Science, Technology, and a 3D-Printed Beak Rescued a Bald Eagle, by Deborah Lee Rose
Book of Bones:10 Record-Breaking Animals, by Gabrielle Balkan
Danza! Amalia Hernandez and El Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, by Duncan Tonatiuh
Earth! My First 4.54 Billion Years, by Stacy McAnulty
The Hidden Life of a Toad, by Doug Wechsler
Not So Different: What You Really Want to Ask About Having a Disability, by Shane Burcaw
Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless Scientist, by Jess Keating
This Book Isn't Safe, by Colin Furze
This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World, by Matt Lamothe
The Youngest Marcher: The Story of Audrey Faye Hendricks, a Young Civil Rights Activist, by Cynthia Levinson

Congratulations to the 2018 Towner Award Winner: Whoosh! by Chris Barton

Whoosh!: Lonnie Johnson's Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions was voted the 2018 Towner Award winner by students in the state of Washington. Whoosh! is also the 2018 Educators' Choice.

Previous Winners:

2017 Tricky Vic: The Impossibly True Story of the Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower, by Greg Pizzoli

2016 Neighborhood Sharks, by Katherine Roy

2015 Barbed Wire Baseball, by Marissa Moss

2014 Snakes, by Nic Bishop

Voting is for students in grade 2 through 6 in Washington State. Student votes can be submitted by school and public librarians only. In addition, we will recognize an Educators' Choice. This is your chance to share with other educators which book you found most useful in the classroom.

Join the Towner!

Our enthusiastic committee is looking for a few new members. Click here to apply!

The Washington State Student Award for Informational Text

The Towner Award is named after Bill Towner, longtime Seattle librarian and mentor to dozens of librarians. Bill was an outstanding teacher-librarian who worked with thousands of students from all backgrounds and taught all of them his love of literature. Bill showed us how caring teachers and librarians can make a difference.

This award is intended to complement other awards determined by student vote in the state of Washington; the Sasquatch, Washington’s Children Choice Picture Book and Young Readers’ Choice Awards. It is sponsored by the Washington Library Association School Library Division and intended for books enjoyed by students in grades Two through Six.

For the purposes of this award, Informational Text is defined as that which serves chiefly to convey factual information to the reader and may contain biography, narrative and other forms.

Each year a slate of ten books will be selected by a group of librarians from Washington state. This group will include public and school librarians, and members will be selected so as to provide representation for different parts of the state.