Poetry from the Pennsylvania Center for the Book
Two poetry events of the PACFTB that come to fruition each spring are the Public Poetry Project and the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award for Children. Since its inception the PACFTB has a rich tradition of highlighting the importance of poetry in the lives of people at all ages. The Public Poetry Project has a mission to make poetry more available in the daily lives of Pennsylvanians by placing poems in public places. The project produces posters that are sent to locations throughout the Commonwealth in places such as university and public libraries as well as restaurants, bookstores, coffee houses, and other businesses. Since 2000, poems by 40 poets have appeared on the poster series.
Public Poetry Posters for 2008:
Poems, primarily for adults, are chosen by a committee composed of other Pennsylvania poets. The committee is charged, year-to-year, with finding poems by poets with a connection to Pennsylvania—either by birth or a long period of residency. Other than that criterion, there are no other restrictions put on the committee. The resulting series reveals much about Pennsylvania as a place, but it reveals, also, just as much about the work and expansive qualities of poetry.
Public poetry posters for 2008 feature poems by the following poets: CM Burroughs and Thomas Kane, both from the Pittsburgh area; Pamela M. Perkins-Frederick from Bensalem, Pennsylvania; and Luray Gross from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Each poet read their work at the annual Public Poetry Project event titled An Evening of Pennsylvania Poets, sponsored by the University Libraries on March 20. Copies of the poetry posters are available at no charge by contacting Caroline Wermuth, outreach coordinator, at cvw1@psu.edu.
The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award for Children is a national award that recognizes a poet for the most outstanding book of poetry for children of the year. The book is selected by a juried panel of nationally recognized teachers, librarians, and scholars. Now in its sixteenth year, the 2008 award winner is Carole Boston Weatherford for Birmingham, 1963 (Wordsong, an imprint of Boyds Mills Press). The award and a $1000 prize were presented on May 2 at the Pennsylvania School Librarians' Association Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Two honor books for 2008 were also named—Blue Lipstick (Clarion Books, a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint) by John Grandits and This is Just to Say(Houghton Mifflin Company) by Joyce Sidman.