In 2020 Henkes was awarded the ALA's Children's Literature Legacy Award, celebrating his entire body of work.

In 2014, he received a Newbery Honor for his book, The Year of Billy Miller. The Phoenix Awards from the Children's Literature Association recognize the best books that did not win major awards when they were first published twenty years earlier. Henkes won the inaugural Phoenix Picture Book Award in 2013 for Owen. All of his books to date have been published by Greenwillow Books. The next year he won the Caldecott Medal for Kitten's First Full Moon, recognizing that as the year's best children's picture book published in the U.S. In 2004, he was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal for Olive's Ocean.

In 1994 Henkes was a runner-up for one of the premier American Library Association (ALA) children's book awards, the Caldecott Medal for Owen, one of his mouse books. More than 50 books followed, including Chrysanthemum and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. Henkes' first book, All Alone, was published in 1981 by Greenwillow Books. Henkes has written and illustrated around fifty critically acclaimed and award-winning picture books, early readers, and novels in his career thus far. Henkes, one of five children, says that many of his storylines are inspired by his family and the neighborhood where he grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. This theme is common in many of Henkes' later books. The book's theme deals with how a child describes the pleasures of occasional solitude. Henkes wrote his first book during his freshman year in college. Henkes writes and illustrates children's picture books, many of which feature mice as their main characters. He discovered that children's books combined both his literary and artistic interests. Kevin Henkes (pronounced HANK-us ) thought he would be an artist until his junior year of high school when one of his teachers encouraged him in his writing efforts. It was only the second time any author has won that combination of awards. His picture book Waiting was named both a 2016 Caldecott Honor Book and a Geisel Honor Book. Two of his books were Newbery Medal Honor Books, Olive's Ocean in 2004 and The Year of Billy Miller in 2014. As an illustrator he won the Caldecott Medal for Kitten's First Full Moon (2004). Kevin Henkes (born November 27, 1960) is an American writer and illustrator of children's books.

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