Book award named after city teacher

The Canadian Children’s Book Centre has taken over administration of the Richard Allen Chase Memorial Award which was named after a Lethbridge teacher/librarian and awarded every year to a Canadian children’s title written for an elementary school-aged audience.

The award comes with a $2,500 cash prize and goes to a work that exemplifies Chase’s “guiding principles of compassion, kindness, humanity, environmentalism, inclusivity, and connection to the land,” says a press release issued this week.

Ruth McMahon, a library and learning commons facilitator at Winston Churchill High School, said in a statement to the Herald Wednesday that “Richard loved introducing young readers to new books and was tireless in his devotion to introducing students to ‘real authors’ by touring them all across southern Alberta from hamlets to major cities.”

Chase was a contributor to The Herald in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

McMahon was a friend and colleague of Chase’s at both the Lethbridge Children’s Roundtable and the board of the Rocky Mountain Book Award which first established the Chase prize in 2022.

Chase was a longtime supporter of the CCBC.

Chase and wife Alice taught at Lakeview Elementary where the library bears his name.

“As a founding member of the Lethbridge Children’s Literature Roundtable and the RMBA, and through his work with the CCBC’s Canadian Children’s Book Week, Richard’s name became synonymous with the promotion of exemplary Canadian children’s literature,” says the release.

The award will be presented this fall at the CCBC book awards in Toronto and a call for submissions is open until May 10. More details can be found at bookcentre.ca/racma-2024.