Cynthia Rylant won the 1993 Newbery Medal for Missing May. She delivered this acceptance speech at the annual meeting of the American Library Association in New Orleans on June 27, 1993.

This is the biggest thank-you note I’ve ever had to write in my life. Believe it or not, I’ve never been much good with words when I’ve tried to express gratitude and, especially, love. It is as if my heart swells so big that it cuts off all the circulation to my brain, which shuts down just as I need to find a few good words. It is our spirits which understand love, not our minds, and our spirits, wisely, are never wordy. When you see that quiet owl swoop across your path in the woods at night, or those beautiful geese fly V-shaped over a dark lake in early morning, or your own little child lie soft and moist in innocent slumber, it is your spirit which leaves you mute at the sight of these things and which moves you to understand them only with your heart.

Thus it is hard for me now to find words. On this momentous occasion when I am required to give a grand speech, I have been rendered nearly speechless.

I need to issue thanks to people who have made my life so beautiful that I have been inspired to write beautiful stories.

The first will be my mother, who managed, I don’t know how, never to belittle or condemn any opinion I ever held. And, believe me, I held some wild opinions growing up. She loved me without judgment and patiently re-adjusted as I came home on holidays sometimes a vegetarian, sometimes not, sometimes a Christian, sometimes not, sometimes married, sometimes not. I had a baby when I was young and broke, and she rescued me from those times I was only steps away from the welfare office. And not once, though she has had countless opportunities, has she ever said to me, “I told you so.”

I was raised in an atmosphere of forgiveness, and this may be the finest gift God has given me on this earth. Knowing that I would be forgiven by my mother, my family, if I ever failed at anything I tried gave me the courage to be a writer, the courage to place my work in the world for judgment, and the courage to keep on trying to say something important in my books.

I must thank my grandparents, who raised me for several years in Cool Ridge, West Virginia, until I was eight. There is no question in my mind that it was during those years that the writer in me was born. And though I don’t remember it, I am sure I had many conversations with the angels as I walked in those West Virginia mountains, and what they said to me I tried to remember and write down after I was grown. I don’t think I am the only person who spoke to angels as a child. I think probably most of us did. And whether we grew into writers, or painters, or teachers, or librarians, we kept that light inside us that was the evidence of God, and when we loved books like Charlotte’s Web, The Runaway Bunny, Frog and Toad Are Friends (all Harper), and even The Stupids Step Out (Houghton), it was because of all that angel light that had fallen on us as children.

My grandparents gave me a small, warm, quiet house. They gave me faith in breakfast every morning and supper every night. They gave me a garden rich with the smell of carrots and potatoes and beans. They gave me the sacrifice of all their work on my behalf, and from them I learned steadfastness.

I grew up reading comic books because there was no library in my town or in my school, and I did not enter a public library until I was in my twenties.

When I was twenty-three, just out of college and desperate for a job, I went to the Cabell County Public Library in Huntington, West Virginia, and asked for a job as a clerk. I was hired and assigned to the children’s department.

Having grown up reading comic books and the Nancy Drew books my mother bought for me at the dime store, I did not know there was any such thing as children’s literature. I had majored in English in college, and still I did not know this.

I spent only five months working in that children’s room—I was, myself, growing my own baby, who would be delivered in the oranges and reds of the fall. In those few months in that treasure chest of children’s books, I discovered what I was.

I was a children’s book writer.

I also learned many things about libraries those months that I have never forgotten. The most important thing I learned is that they are free. That any child from any kind of house in any kind of neighborhood in this whole vast country may walk into a building which has a room full of books meant just for him and may choose whichever ones he wants to read and may take them home because they are free. And they are not free in a way which might diminish the child, not in the way of second-hand clothes or Salvation Army Christmas toys.

They are free in the most democratic and humane way. Both the poor child and the wealthy child are privileged with free libraries, and whenever they enter one, Make Way for Ducklings (Viking) will be sitting there waiting for them both.

When I discovered I was a children’s book writer, I began writing stories at home and mailing them to publishing houses in New York City. I was still living in West Virginia, had never met an author or illustrator, had only just found children’s literature myself, and had not the foggiest idea how people became published. But I bought a copy of a book which listed publishers’ addresses, and I mailed my stories to New York anyway. Because that’s what I was put here on earth to do in 1978.

And that year I received two more gifts from God.

One, the most important, was my son, whom I named Nathaniel after one of my favorite writers. And that spirit in me which had been a little too quiet was stirred by this young child, and I found in this stirring my strong writer’s voice. It sounded like this:

When I was young in the mountains, Grandfather came home in the evening covered with the black dust of a coal mine. Only his lips were clean, and he used them to kiss the top of my head.

And it was this voice, this writing, which led to the second gift of that year. The acceptance of my first book for children and new meaning for my life.

Writers, especially new ones, need editors, and the newer the writer, the more desperate that need.

God gave me a third gift: He gave me Richard Jackson.

I am not sure I would have written more than a few books in my life had I not been blessed with Dick Jackson on my maiden voyage. It is hard to believe you are worth much as a writer when you first start out, and if there’s no one there convincing you otherwise, no one there waiting in hopeful anticipation of your next work, then it is hard to keep writing. You can talk yourself out of it and go work in a bank instead.

Perhaps most people think editors are simply the ones who fix the cracks and crevices in a writer’s book until it is fit to be published. I certainly thought that, before finding Dick.

But I know better now. I know what it is that editors need to give and must give to the new writers who feel small and ungifted in this big corporate machine called publishing.

Editors must give love, first and foremost. It is love which guides all our best work, which makes anything on this planet permanent. Without it, whatever is born, whether a child or a book, will be unable to shine.

Dick Jackson loved me. He has loved many writers and artists, and his love for their talent and their struggle and their innocence has given the world beautiful books like The Slave Dancer and Dog Song (both Bradbury), and this love has made us all better.

We have had God’s angels among us, and though we no longer see some of them, they are with us still. James Marshall, Arnold Lobel, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown: they gave us art that lifted us and reminded us of the light from which we came and toward which we are returning. They worked, always, in love.

I have many friends here tonight: fellow writers, illustrators, editors, librarians. I have my most dear ones here—my best friend, Diane; my sweetheart, Dav; my son, Nate; and my mother, Lee—who make my life safe and who make it worth living.

Outside this room, we all have the stars. We have squirrels in the trees and whales sublime in the oceans. We have birds which will leave us in winter and which will return to us in spring. And flowers promising to do the same. We have wet rain, white snow, and always the sky. We have the universe.

I want to thank the Newbery Committee of 1993, the American Library Association, all children’s booksellers, all children’s book publishers, all children’s librarians. I am honored to have been a part of you this past decade, and I cannot wait to see all of the beautiful books which are waiting for us in the future—which wait for the poor child and the wealthy child. And which will be given to them with love.

Thank you, and God bless you all.