2026 Walter Dean Myers Award

We Need Diverse Books named the winners of the 2026 Walter Dean Myers Awards, its eleventh annual prize for outstanding books by diverse creators, in early 2026. In the Younger Readers category, for ages nine to thirteen, the award went to Derrick Barnes for The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze, with Renée Watson's All the Blues in the Sky named the honor book. In the Teen category, for ages thirteen to eighteen, the winner was Champion, written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld and illustrated by Ed Laroche, with Idris Goodwin's King of the Neuroverse as the honor book. A committee of librarians and educators chose the books, and the awards were presented on March 23, 2026, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.