There's a new Laura Ingalls Wilder book award. A Springfield author will get it.

There's a new literary award named for Laura Ingalls Wilder — and the first people to get it are a Springfield man and a Nashville woman.

On Thursday, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Children's Literature Festival in Mansfield announced the winners of its first-ever Laura Ingalls Wilder Children's Literature Award.

The honor, intended to reward excellence in children's literature and illustration, will go to one author and one artist each year during the festival, to be held each November.

Springfield children's author David Harrison, along with Nashville artist-illustrator Higgins Bond, are the very first honorees for the new award. Harrison and Bond will receive their awards during the festival, set for Nov. 5-6 in Mansfield, where Wilder lived for many years. (Registration for the festival, whose honorary chairperson is former Springfield-Greene County Library District Executive Director Annie Busch, is available at its website, liwclf.com.)

The 83-year-old Harrison, who's written nearly 100 books that have sold millions of copies, told the News-Leader Friday he was "delighted" to be chosen for a new honor bearing Wilder's name.

It's a well-known one. Wilder, one of USA TODAY's Women of the Century, rose to fame primarily due to the nine books she penned beginning in the 1930s for her "Little House" series, later popularized as a TV show starring Michael Landon. These tales of pioneer family life in the 1870s and 1880s have sold at least 60 million copies, according to the New York Times Book Review.

Harrison said that among role-model authors, he looked to E.B. White more than Wilder — but he was full of praise for the Missouri resident's work Friday.

Harrison said, "One of the things that endeared Wilder to her readers was how personal and homely she was. Reading her books was a lot like listening to a relative or someone you love telling you about when she was a little girl. That has great appeal and can be used by writers of all kinds of genres."

If the award sounds familiar, it's because the American Library Association honored children's authors with a similarly-named award from 1954 until 2018, according to the Times. As the News-Leader reported two years ago, the librarian group removed Wilder's name from the honor due to concerns that Wilder's writing about Native American and Black folks veered into racism.

At the time, the then-director of the Wilder home and museum in Mansfield voiced "disappointment" in the decision and said, "However difficult it may be to agree with social mores within these years, the fact remains that was a different time and what was accepted then would not be today."

On Friday, Harrison said he isn't bothered by association with Wilder.

"History has a lot of bones in it for those with an appetite to dig them up," he told the News-Leader. "For me, I’m happy to have my name associated with her legacy."

Reached by phone at her home in Nashville, Higgins Bond said she didn't know anything about the librarian-Wilder controversy of 2018 but was excited to receive the award.

"All I know about is 'Little House on the Prairie,' that's the full extent of my knowledge," she told the News-Leader.

"It’s a great honor for somebody to be acknowledged, especially at this stage of my life," Bond said. "I’ll be 69 on my next birthday."

Developed over a career spanning more than four decades, Bond's body of work includes visual art for clients as diverse as NBC, the U.S. Postal Service and Hennessy Cognac, but she is perhaps best known for illustrating dozens of children's books. For her most recent, "Lorraine: The Girl Who Sang the Storm Away," Bond teamed up with Grammy-winning singer Ketch Secor.

She told the News-Leader that most of her illustration has been for nonfiction children's books covering topics like animals and history, "but I got the opportunity to illustrate this fiction story and the author of the book is a pretty famous country-western singer. It was quite a collaboration for the two of us to get together."

Harrison and Bond said they might collaborate between themselves in the future, given their shared interest in children's nonfiction about the natural world. Bond said she even read one of Harrison's early books to her own son back in the '70s, and read the same book to her three grandchildren more recently.

"That’s kind of a really wonderful full-circle moment," Bond said. "That’s a really pleasurable thing about raising a child, being able to read to them."

Gregory Holman is the investigative reporter for the News-Leader. Email news tips to gholman@gannett.com and consider supporting vital local journalism by subscribing. Learn more by visiting News-Leader.com/subscribe.