Photograph of Tomie dePaola Accepting the Jo Osborne Award

This photograph shows author and illustrator Tomie dePaola accepting the 2003 Jo Osborne Award for Humor in Children's Literature. He is shown behind a podium, holding the award and smiling down at it. The ceremony took place on January 31, 2003, as part of The Ohio State University Children's Literature Conference.

dePaola was the author and illustrator of over 260 children's books, among them "Strega Nona," which received a Caldecott Honor in 1976, and "26 Fairmount Avenue," which won a Newbery Honor in 2000. A graduate of the Pratt Institute, dePaola received numerous honors for his gentle, humorous works, including the Children's Literature Legacy Award in 2011, and was the 1990 U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Anderson Award.

The Jo Osborne Award for Humor in Children’s Literature was established in 1996 in honor of Jo Osborne, who was a children’s librarian at Worthington Libraries from 1979 until her death at age 59 in 1995. The award sought to honor her commitment to bringing children, books and humor together, and recognized the art of humor in either a single children's book or in the body of work of a children's literature author. As described in the brochure for the award, Jo "sought out the silly, the funny, the poignant, the witty for storytelling and puppet shows to impart a love of books to all the children who were lucky enough to cross her path" during her years as a librarian.

In addition to dePaola's receipt of the award in 2003, the other Jo Osborne Award winners were Patricia Polacco (1996), Sid Fleischman (1997), Steven Kellogg (1998), Jon Scieszka (1999), William Steig (2000), Rosemary Wells (2001), Kevin Henkes (2002), Paula Danzinger (2004), Daniel Pinkwater (2010), and Betsy Lewin (2011).