Samantha M. Clark’s debut novel The Boy, the Boat, and the Beast, published by Simon & Schuster, has won the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Crystal Kite Award for Texas and Oklahoma.

Congratulations to Samantha Clark, who has been very busy this year as she is the regional advisor for Austin SCBWI. She worked on the conference in some major capacity, as my emails came from her.

Description of the book from the publisher’s website:

A boy washes up on a mysterious, seemingly uninhabited beach. Who is he? How did he get there? The boy can’t remember. When he sees a light shining over the foreboding wall of trees that surrounds the shore, he decides to follow it, in the hopes that it will lead him to answers. The boy’s journey is a struggle for survival and a search for the truth—a terrifying truth that once uncovered, will force him to face his greatest fear of all if he is to go home.