A big welcome to folks landing here from the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented, who now have us listed on their "Online Resources" page. On your right, you’ll see some links under "welcome" to give you last year’s contest results. That’s probably what you came to see. We have a new contest coming up October 1. You’re welcome …
Volunteers needed
Wanted: Nice bloggers who wish to give up any semblance of a personal life to help us select 2007 Cybils winners. We go through two rounds of judging, so we need lots of bodies. Rules for volunteering are more persnickety than the rest of the contest, since there’s a mountain of books awaiting you and we need to know you’re …
Pardon Our Dust
We’re putting up the scaffolding and donning our hard hats… a site redesign will be underway soon as we prep for the 2007 Cybils. You’ll see gradual changes as we tinker with the layout (buh-bye, black background!) and update the logo. We plan to start posting new content around the middle of the month, with nominations opening Oct. 1. Mark …
Congratulations, Loree!
A big shout-out to one of our panelists, Loree Griffin Burns, whose Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion (Scientists in the Field) was named a nonfiction honor book in the 2007 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature. Go see for yourself and then stop by and congratulate her.
An interview with Sylvia Long
Our apologies to Kris Bordessa, who conducted this interview with Sylvia Long several weeks ago. It fell through the cracks, for which we’re mortally ashamed. An Egg is Quiet, written by Dianna Aston and illustrated by Sylvia Long took top honors for the children’s non-fiction book. The Cybil judges showered praise ("lovely!" "breathtaking!") on this title. With gentle text that …
YOUR TURN: The Cybils post mortem
Back in January, we asked for feedback on the nominating process, and you answered. Big time. And we heard you. We also promised you’d be invited to our post mortem, the term editors use for dissecting their publication after it hits the stands. Or, in this case, the tubes. What went right? What needs tweaking? What needs an extreme makeover? …
Telling the Story in History: An Interview with Russell Freedman
Russell Freedman received the first ever Cybils Award in nonfiction for Freedom Walkers (Holiday House), an account of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955. What impressed the judges was the way Freedman told the story through the lives of the ordinary men and women, teens and adults who participated. Even the icons of the Civil Rights Movement are portrayed …
Q&A with Laura Amy Schlitz
The Middle Grade Fiction category of the Cybils Award didn’t exactly lack for nominations. So how do you go about selecting the best of the best? Well sometimes a book rises above and beyond the literary pack. In A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, author Laura Amy Schlitz manages to combine great writing and an atmospheric text with situations and characters that …
Hooray for Chris!
Please everyone go congratulate one of our organizers, Chris at Bartography, for selling his second book to Little, Brown. For now, he’s cryptically calling it S.V.T. We wish him the best and look forward to its publication (and learning its real title!). Here’s the link again.
Working in tandem
We had a nice surprise from the folks at Tandem Library Books the other day. I first noticed our hits going through the roof–more than 500 by midday, a number that nearly rivaled our big announcement. What’s up with that, I wondered. But there wasn’t any link in the referrers; everyone was coming from emails and then remaining to browse …