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I am so proud and excited to announce that our newest title published in December of 2006, The Truth About Teaching: What I Wish the Veterans Had Told Me, has won the Benjamin Franklin Award for the Education category. Over 1,800 books were entered and judged by more than 150 industry experts from the worlds of booksellers, reviewers, librarians, and book designers. It is such an incredible honor to have won the Gold in our category for 2007!

Coleen and I both flew in to New York City to attend the awards ceremony and had a wonderful time talking about teaching and her new manuscript (keep an eye out in the next year or so) as well as wondering about the outcome of the Benjamin Franklin awards. The award banquet/ceremony was excellent and we sat at a table with several other finalists hoping to also win in their own category. I felt lucky that we didn’t sit next to anyone in our own category as that would have been quite awkward. As it was, we were the only ones at our table who won an award and while that was a bit difficult, it didn’t detract from our excitement at winning.

The ceremony was full of “pomp and circumstance” with two hosts and large screens showing the book covers for each finalist in each category. Once the finalists for that category were announced, we were treated to the hosts announcing, “And the winner is…” with a very significant pause before stating the winner. Then the winning book cover was shown on the screen while the publisher and author went to the stage to accept the award and say a few words.

Some of the publishers were quite verbose and droned on and on. I, myself, was so excited and jumpy that I don’t know how some of them looked so calm and collected. I didn’t take long, but wanted to share the story of how Coleen’s book came across my desk. She sent me the manuscript last June and I printed it out in order to take home to review it. I thought to myself, “I’ll just glance through this quickly before taking it home,” and opened the first page. By the end of the page I was hooked and I found myself sitting there reading the manuscript to the very end. I knew right then that this was a book I had to publish. As a teacher her words resonated within me and I found myself saying out loud, “That is so true!” over and over. It was as though she had taken my very experiences in the classroom and translated them onto the page. After years of hearing, “Oh, it can’t be that hard,” it was a delight to read similar experiences coming from another teacher. As a publisher her writing style had me enraptured and I knew that I would have very little editing to endure for this project. I called Coleen the very next day and said, “I have to publish this!” And as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”