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 Read the rest of this entry »
Claire
Kim
