First Mock Newbery 2026 Suggestion Call: Early Contenders

Happy March everyone. After a brief break, it’s time for our off-season Mock Newbery suggestion call-out.

Similar to the actual Newbery committee, we take a call for monthly suggestions of Newbery contenders. We’ll do this on the first Monday of each month through August, then jump into book discussions in September.

These monthly suggestions help us identify titles to seek out and read. Here are the guidelines we use every year for the Heavy Medal monthly suggestions:

• Suggestions are books that might have a chance to contend for the Newbery. They don’t have to be perfect, best-book-of-year type titles, but can include books that could possibly be in that discussion.
• Suggestions must be eligible books. Eligibility is addressed in the Newbery Terms and Criteria. If you’re not sure if a book is eligible, go ahead and include it. We’ll make our best guess at eligibility later.
• For Suggestions, please include title and author. If you want to add a comment, great, but we’ll save critical discussions for the Fall.
• You can suggest up to 5 titles per month. Less is fine. The real Committee typically doesn’t have a Suggestions limit, but we’ll use one to make sure our list doesn’t get too long.
• Suggest only books that you’ve read or listened to. Sometimes you hear that a book is great or you know from the author that it’s something we should all read…but you still can’t suggest it until you’ve read it yourself.
• Suggestions should be books that are already published. If you read an advance copy, please hold off on suggesting until it’s actual release date. That keeps us roughly on the same time line.
• If a book you’ve read is already on the list, go ahead and include it. We’ll post an update every month listing titles and numbers of Suggestions. Early favorites tend to lead the suggestions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll win it all.
• If you missed a suggestion deadline, it’s ok. Just go ahead and post next month!

If you have any questions about our suggestion process, just ask below. If you’re ready with suggestions, just post them below. We’ll accept suggestions through the end of the day on Saturday, March 8th, then post the results on the following Monday.

Filed under: Heavy Medal Mock, Suggestions