Lit Think

Want to get a grip on the titles just awarded those pretty stickers? Academics, authors, librarians and other people of interest will discuss this year’s awards over the next few months. I am excited about March in particular! There are plenty of lurkers, so don’t hesitate to drop in…

CCBCnet sent out an email today with award info links, listed below. You can sign up for the CCBCnet discussion list here. (Note: this is a professional topic-oriented discussion list, sans trolling or off-subject posts.)

********************
Week of January 25: 2010 Newbery and Caldecott awards

1. Newbery Award
2. Caldecott Award

Week of February 1: 2010 Batchelder, Geisel and Sibert awards

1. Batchelder Award
2. Geisel Award
3. Sibert Award

Week of February 8: 2010 Printz Award, YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, and William C. Morris Award

1. Printz Award
2. YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction
3. Morris Award

Week of February 15: 2010 Odyssey Award and Audio Books

1. Odyssey Award

Week of February 22: 2010 Schneider Family Book Award and Evaluating Books about People with Disabilities

1. Schneider Award

First Half of March: 2010 Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpre, and American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Awards and the Importance of Awards From Cultural Perspectives

1. CSK Award
2. Pura Belpre Award
3. American Indian Youth Literature Awards

I highly recommend the Afghan Women Writer’s Project. Some of the poems are painful to read, many are beautiful, all are illuminating. I signed up recently for their regular email of new writing, and I have not been disappointed in the integrity of their posts; they give me pause to think, a new eye, a touch on my pulse.

My daughter Ciara, age 11, wrote this in response to a poem by Sabira that was in today’s email from the project.

Sabira is writing about the power of education, of seeing beauty desolated. She is sorrowing for her land, but she is sowing seeds of the future, of a peaceful land with no more “voices of guns and missiles.” She is sowing the seeds of the next sixteen springs, she is building the winter nests for the swallows of the next sixteen winters. She is tilling the land, her homeland, so it is ready for the next spring, the seeds of peace.