Goucher Graduate Wins Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature

Release date: January 17, 2008 |

Laura Amy Schlitz '77, a librarian at the Park School of Baltimore, was awarded the 2008 Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village.

The medal is given annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature.

The book began as a project for Schlitz's fifth-grade students, who were studying the Middle Ages. Schlitz said she wanted the students to have something to perform, but no one wanted a small part, so she wrote three-minute monologues for 22 characters.

In a series of interconnected first-person character sketches that feature young people living in and around an English manor in 1255, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies creates a better understanding of the poverty, loss, and hope of medieval life. The monologues were first performed in 1997 and have been recited each year since.

Schlitz has spent most of her life working as a librarian and professional storyteller. She has written three other children’s books -- The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug for Troy, A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama, and The Bearskinner --  as well plays for young people that have been performed in professional theaters nationwide.