The books on the nominee lists are selected by the Maud Hart Lovelace Selection Committee. The winning authors are then invited to attend an award presentations in the fall, location and date to be announced by the MYRA executive board. The current year's winners and next year's nominees are announced by the MYRA executive board in April. Students vote for a favorite title and ballots may be submitted to the Minnesota Youth Reading Awards beginning February 25 to March 31. Students in grades 3-5 who have read or listened to at least three titles from the Division I nominee list and students in grades 6-8 who have read or listened to at least three titles from the Division II nominee list are eligible to vote for the Maud Hart Lovelace Award. Nominated titles are works of fiction of recognized quality selected by independent regional reading groups. Its purpose is to encourage recreational reading among school age children. In fact, so much in the books was taken from real life that it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between fact and fiction.The Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award is a children's read and vote book award. Ray like Stella Palmer Hart Julia like Kathleen Margaret like Helen and Betsy is like me, except that, of course, I glamorized her to make her a proper heroine.” Tacy and Tib are based on Maud’s real-life best friends, Frances “Bick” Kenney and Marjorie “Midge” Gerlach, and Deep Valley is based on Mankato.

“The Ray family is a true portrayal of the Hart family. “I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents,” Maud wrote. The Betsy-Tacy books are based very closely on Maud’s own life. The final book in the series, Betsy’s Wedding, was published in 1955.

So Maud took Betsy through high school and beyond college to the “great world” and marriage. Maud did not intend to write an entire series when Betsy-Tacy, the first book, was published in 1940, but readers asked for more. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood, and it was these stories that gave her the idea of writing the Betsy-Tacy books.

The Lovelaces’ daughter, Merian, was born in 1931. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories. The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910 and settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. When Maud was 10, a booklet of her poems was printed by age 18, she had sold her first short story. Like Betsy Ray, Maud followed her mother around the house at age 5 asking questions (such as “How do you spell ‘going down the street’?”) for the stories she had already begun to write. Maud Hart Lovelace was born April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota.

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