This just in: Katherine Paterson will be named the next National Ambassador for Young People's Literature tomorrow (PW, SLJ, and NYT). She succeeds Jon Scieszka, who was our first ambassador and by all accounts (Mary Lee has collected some from around the kidlitosphere in thank-you post at A Year of Reading) did a bang-up job. Thank you, Jon Scieszka!

And congratulations, Katherine Paterson! I'm so pleased with her appointment. Paterson has always been a favorite of mine; I'll read anything she writes (including her essays on religion and writing). Most recently, that was her latest novel, The Day of the Pelican (Clarion, 2009), about an Albanian girl and her family who have to flee from Kosovo (and has anyone else noticed that there were a number of excellent middle-grade novels that involved wars in 2009?). Most often, it's Bridge to Terabithia.