Top 2025 Printz Award contenders include poetry, stories featuring characters at both the younger and older ends of the age spectrum, graphic works, and an author who could get her fourth Printz recognition. 

Utilizing various poetic styles, Renée Watson’s Black Girl You Are Atlas is a stunning collection of semi-autobiographical poems tracing girlhood through womanhood. Exploring love, hair, change, wishes, aging, sisterhood, healing, and resilience, this is a joyful, and at times mournful, celebration of self and Blackness. Perfectly complemented by Ekua Holmes’s multimedia collages (worthy of awards in their own right), each masterfully crafted poem packs a powerful punch and, taken as a whole, the book creates a moving ode to power, voice, and identity. 

The age range for the Printz is 12 to 18, but few past winners and honor books have main characters that skew to the lower end of that spectrum. Set in the 1990s, John Schu’s Louder Than Hunger features eighth grade Jake, who turns 14 while at inpatient treatment for anorexia nervosa. Professional reviews differ on the target age of this book, with some suggesting 10–14 and others tagging it as for readers up to 18. It can be found in the children’s or YA section of libraries and feels as likely to win a Newbery as it does a Printz. Jake’s story is told in verse, allowing an intimate, close narration that captures his complicated feelings and experiences. Schu’s compassionate, courageous novel is a strong contender that provides important representation—a boy with an eating disorder—and has high literary merit across all aspects of story, voice, style, setting, and characters. 

Historically, graphic titles have not gotten a lot of recognition from the Printz committee, but one standout in the running this year is Christine Mari’s Halfway There: A Graphic Memoir of Self-Discovery. Whereas Schu’s novel represents the younger end of the scope of books this award considers, Mari’s graphic memoir, which is marketed as YA, lands on the older side of that scale, with her main character turning 20 during the story. Mari shares what it is like to go back to Tokyo after living in America since age five. With a white father and a Japanese mother, Mari has always felt like “half” of something, never whole, always invisible or on the outside of things. Her feelings of being lost and lonely are amplified in Tokyo, with an eventual diagnosis of depression finally pushing her to start working to see herself existing in all kinds of in-betweens, but also accepting who she is as enough. The muted palette conveys Mari’s unhappiness and the illustrations underscore her isolation and loneliness. Mari’s struggle to figure out what it means to exist in multiple spaces, as well as how to grow up and how to ask for help, will speak to readers of all ages. 

Given the track record of graphic novels, one winning is a long shot, but two taking home awards? Well, the Printz is all about breaking new ground. Gene Luen Yang already has both an award and honor, so it’s no surprise that his newest book, Lunar New Year Love Story, featuring art by LeUyen Pham, absolutely feels Printz-worthy. Vietnamese American Valentina Tran used to believe in true love and the power of her invisible best friend, Saint V (picture Cupid). But her world is rocked by the revelation of a family secret and her grandma’s information that all love in their family is fated to end badly. Saint Valentine—no longer cute-looking, but more of a ghastly apparition—tells Val that with love, only suffering is certain and offers a solution to future heartbreak. Tracing how relationships change and grow, Yang skillfully explores a complicated, emotionally resonant story, while Pham’s superb illustrations capture the depth of feelings that unfurl over this sweeping look at family estrangement, lion dancing, old wounds, new truths, curses, and courage.

[Read: The Printz Grows Up: High Points in the History of an Influential Award]

Could A.S. King become the first author to collect four Printz awards? As it stands, she is the only one to have taken the winning medal twice (2020, 2024); she also earned an honor in 2011. Pick the Lock is a masterpiece of literary excellence. Brimming with distinctive characters, the exquisitely developed plot is told through narration, security camera footage, rules, lessons, an opera, postcards, and a film script. This is a story of a monstrous father, a punk rock singer–mother confined at home to a system of pneumatic tubes, and the children struggling to grasp the ever-expanding truth after a lifetime of lies, brainwashing, and gaslighting. With sophisticated structures and themes, and told with fierceness and fragility, King interrogates the ideas of safety and choice as main character Jane (and others) work to not just control the narrative, but maybe even reverse it. Nothing short of brilliant. 

Amanda MacGregor works in an elementary library and blogs for “Teen Librarian Toolbox.”