The National Book Foundation started this award last year to promote new and exciting ways to encourage reading. It’s the Innovations in Reading Award that brought readergirlz to our attention last year. Each winner receives a grant of $2,500 from the National Book Foundation, and in today’s economy, those are real dollars. Here are this year’s prize winners:
Mount Olive Baptist Church
Hopkins, SC
Hopkins, SC doesn’t have a library anywhere in sight let alone a bookstore (the closest is 26 miles away, I know because I looked it up on IndieBound). To fill a need, the members of Mount Olive Baptist Church combed garage sales, bought books and asked state libraries for donations and created their own children’s library. Each child has a chance to talk about what she is reading. The National Book Foundation described the church as “wonderfully supportive of this secular activity.” Amen!
Cellpoems
Brooklyn, NY
This may be this year’s readergirlz for me, it’s a poetry literary journal “published” via text messages. A couple of poems are published each week, so I won’t be swamped with messages (that was my twitter experience until I figured out who to follow with my devices on). The writers are established poets (or so the National Book Foundation says, and they should know, I don’t really have any idea) and ” by publishing poems of just 140 characters or less, Cellpoems does not aim to decrease readers’ attention spans; rather, it adds focused, distilled work to a grand tradition of short poems, from the tanka and haiku to the monosonnet, and aims to present poetry to as many readers as possible by making it easily accessible to digitally-minded readers.” You can sign up via the website or by texting JOIN to 317.426.POEM.
826 Valencia
San Francisco, CA
Let me just start by saying that I’m jealous that 826 Valencia got the award and not 826LA. The 826 programs, regardless of where they are located, work with students aged 6 to 18 with their writing skills and to foster a passion for writing reading. In Valencia, the 826 program holds after-school tutoring programs five days a week where students work with tutors and then spend 20 minutes reading books in the 826 Valencia library. After homework, the students can work on a variety of extra-curricular writing programs.
Look to see if you have an 826 program in your area. In Los Angeles there are a variety of programs, not all of them based on tutoring. My daughter attended a writing workshop at the Hammer Museum a couple of years ago. It was led by an author and focused on mystery writing, she came home so excited about writing stories, now she chose a writing camp for the summer (not that the two are necessarily connected, but who knows).
Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop
Washington, DC
One of last year’s winners, Father’s Bridging the Miles, helped incarcerated men read with their children. This year the National Book Foundation continues to impact incarcerated men by awarding a grant to Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop. This program uses books and creative writing to help rehabilitate teenage boys who are incarcerated as adults in DC jails. The young men are 16 and 17 years old, but read, on average, at a fifth-grade level. Before joining the book club, most have never finished a book. The goal is to introduce the young men to the “life-changing power of books” while also connecting them with the services they need to transition back into the public.
San Diego, CA
Similar to last year’s Father’s Bridging the Miles, United Through Reading connects parents separated from their children through recorded reading. The parent reads the book while being recorded on DVD and the DVD is sent to the child. It’s a method used to connect soldiers around the world, from Navy ships, to Iraq, to Afghanistan to USO bases, with their children. There is a program for incarcerated parents and new pilot program for grandparents who live far away from their grandchildren.
I love this award, it’s fascinating each year to see how people and organizations are using books to improve lives. Congratulations to all of the winners!
Tags: church libraries, ideas to encourage reading, reading and tutoring programs, reading in prisons, short poetry, support for incarcerated families, support for military families, text literature
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What a great list!
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