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These Caldecott winners are not resting

Winning a Caldecott Medal is the career pinnacle for a children's-book illustrator. Awarded annually by the American Library Association to the best-illustrated children's book, the Caldecott Medal brings fame and fortune to the winner.

But the artists don't stop creating books after winning the award. To prove the point, here's a look at new books by some Caldecott Medalists:

• Let's just go ahead and say it: Kevin Henkes, who won the 2005 Caldecott Medal for " Kitten's First Full Moon ," is a picture-book genius.

In his newest book, "Little White Rabbit" (Greenwillow, $16.99, ages 2-5), Henkes pays quiet but powerful homage to previous picture-book masters such as Margaret Wise Brown and William Steig as he tells the story of a curious bunny.

Like any young child, the little white rabbit wonders about the world around him. As he hops through tall grass, for example, he wonders what it's like to be green. Wandering through fir trees, the little white rabbit speculates on what it might be like to be tall. And so it goes, until Henkes concludes the book with a statement that shows how much he knows about — and empathizes with — his young readers: "Soon little white rabbit was home. He still wondered about many things, but he didn't wonder who loved him."

Henkes' artwork, done with colored pencil and acrylic paint, conveys the cozy joy of his story. Clearly, readers don't have to understand Henkes' homage to past picture-book masters to enjoy "Little White Rabbit." But readers with some knowledge of classic picture books will marvel at the way Henkes riffs on Brown's "Goodnight Moon" and "The Runaway Bunny . " And anyone familiar with Steig's Caldecott-winning "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" will get an extra kick out of Henkes' wordless two-page spread showing how the little white rabbit imagines himself as a rock.

• Author/artist Chris Raschka takes a few simple elements — two dogs, a ball and a couple of kids — and creates an unforgettable wordless tale in "A Ball for Daisy" (Schwartz & Wade/Random House, $16.99, ages 3-6).

Raschka, who won the 2006 Caldecott Medal for "The Hello, Goodbye Window , " uses his trademark loose-lined illustration style to tell the story of Daisy, a dog who is enamored of her red ball, to the point that she sleeps with it on her green-striped couch. So Daisy is stunned when she takes the red ball to a park one day and another dog plays too hard with it and it pops.

Review: The Beach Trees by Karen White « Diary of an Eccentric

After a deep breath, she looked up at a tall oak tree beyond the garden, its leaves still green against the early October sky, the limbs now thick with foliage.  “Because the water recedes, and the sun comes out, and the trees grow back.  Because” — she spread her hands, indicated the garden and the tree and, I imagined, the entire peninsula of Biloxi — “because we’ve learned that great tragedy gives us opportunities for great kindness.  It’s like a needed reminder that the human spirit is alive and well despite all evidence to the contrary.”  She lowered her hands to her sides.  “I figured I wasn’t dead, so I must not be done.” until I turned the last page, I was engrossed in the characters and the setting and had a hard time pulling myself out of the story to get back to the real world.  White once again has created a place I’d love to live and characters I’d love to know in real life.