1/25/2012 Update: At the recent ALA Conference, the award winners were announced and the 2012 Printz winner was Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley.   Click here for more information.  For many years, beloved Kansas librarian Michael L. Printz was considered by many to be the backbone of the American Library Association (ALA). After Printz died in 1996 at the age of 59, the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA, a branch of the ALA) memorialized him by bestowing the Michael L. Printz Award to the best young adult book published the previous year. While fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and anthologies are considered, so far the prize has been awarded to eleven novels and one graphic novel . While the Printz Award program is relatively new, other ALA prizes are not. Generations of parents, students, librarians, and teachers have trusted the reputation of books that have won the John Newbery and Randolf Caldecott medals, the first of ALA’s annual awards for e...