The 2018 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prizes Award Ceremony went off without a hitch on Saturday, February 17, 2018 in the Austin Convention Center. Most of the prize winners, along with family and friends, attended the ceremony in the AAAS Pavilion. While guests snacked on muffins and pastries and drank some much-needed coffee, Maria Sosa, editor-in-chief of SB&F, presented the awards to the winners.
We’ve asked each of the winners to provide us with their remarks
Sarah Wassner Flynn Remarks
If you told me a year ago that I'd be accepting the prestigious AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Hands-On Category for a book about trash, I would have laughed out loud. In fact, as I was writing This Book Stinks!: Gross Garbage, Rotten Rubbish, and the Science of Trash, it became a joke among my friends that I was working on my "trashy novel." But all jokes aside, I must say that I am beyond honored to accept this award today. It is humbling to be on this stage next to authors I've admired for years, and whose work has inspired my own. I would like to thank National Geographic Kids publishing, specifically editors Ariane Szu-Tu and Becky Baines, for trusting me with such an important subject matter and allowing me the creative freedom to turn a very tiny nugget of an idea into a full-color, jam-packed book. Also, my appreciation goes to the stellar design team at National Geographic, led by Callie Broaddus, who breathed life into my content to create such energetic and enlightening layouts on every page.
The support from AAAS and Subaru has been phenomenal. If this recognition means that even more children will read This Book Stinks! and be encouraged to make smarter choices about the amount of trash they produce each day, then I've done my job. Above all, I hope this book inspires kids to want to protect the planet—and play a part in making the world a much less wasteful place.