All (yes, all!) of 2022’s winners have new books coming out that are eligible for the 2023 award, in either children’s or YA. Knowing that much, we got curious: how broad a swath of past winners are represented by the books in this post? Turns out there’s at least one awardee from each of the past seven years of the award with a new queer YA book out this year. That’s pretty remarkable and seems to speak to the opportunities that the explosion of queer YA has given authors to publish more prolifically on LGBTQIA+ themes.

Note: We’ve purposefully excluded titles that appear to have limited queer content but if we’re missing something major, let us know in the comments.

As of January 2022, 8 of the 20 Stonewall Book Award winners have been for younger readers. Of those, 4 were middle grade and 3 were picture books. Only 1 board book has won. With the separation of the award into age categories, we predict more, more, more! Even without that change, this is our longest previous winners post yet (look for YA in part 2 soon). Of the 10 kids books here, 4 (yes, 4!) are by 2021 “Newstoneberrywall” winner Kyle Lukoff. Could it be his year again?