The Book of Life

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT     🕮    Martha Seif Simpson is the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries. She joined us to discuss the 2022 winners of the award, which annually recognizes the best Jewish literature for children and teens. AJL is an affiliate of the American Library Association , so the Sydney Taylor Book Awards are announced at ALA's Youth Media Awards press conference, being held virtually this year on January 24, 2022. You can watch a recording of the announcement on ALA's YouTube channel . Here's my unofficial shortlist of deserving books, and here's the official 2022 Sydney Taylor Book Award press release and the printable list of winners, honors, and notable books. You can also scroll down to see all the winning titles listed, with links to any past podcast appearances by the authors on The Book of Life. A week after the officia...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT       🕮    Rebecca Levitan is the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries. She joined us to discuss the 2021 winners of the award, which annually recognizes the best Jewish literature for children and teens.  AJL is an affiliate of the American Library Association, so the Sydney Taylor Book Awards are announced at ALA's Youth Media Awards press conference, being held virtually this year on January 25, 2021. You can watch a recording of the announcement on ALA's YouTube channel . Here's the official 2021 Sydney Taylor Book Award press release and the printable list of winners, honors, and notable books . The Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour will take place February 8-12, 2021. Details will appear soon at JewishLibraries.org . We also spoke about AJL's Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award . The 2021 winner is Cat...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST      |    READ THE PRESS RELEASE     🕮    Susan Kusel is the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries. She joined us by Skype from her home in Falls Church, VA. to talk about the 2019 winners of the award (and so did her dog Harry).  This year's Sydney Taylor Book Awards are being announced at the ALA Youth Media Awards press conference in Seattle, WA during the ALA Midwinter Meeting on January 28, 2019 at 8am PT. You can watch a live webcast here (and check back later for a recording). Here's the official Sydney Taylor Book Award announcement with the full list of winners, honors, and notable books: click here .  The Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour will take place February 10-14, 2019. For details, click here . The Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award was mentioned in the podcast: click here .   AJL's "Love Your Neighbo...

For More Information Contact: Aileen Grossberg, Coordinator Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award Committee Association of Jewish Libraries STMACAJL@AOL.com tinyurl.com/stma18 January 10, 2018 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award Competition committee is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2018 award. Judith Pransky, author of The Seventh Handmaiden , will receive the award at the annual conference of the Association of Jewish Libraries to be held in Boston, MA, from June 18-20, 2018. The Award is offered annually to an unpublished manuscript that has broad appeal to readers aged 8-13 and presents Jewish life in a positive light. Set in the time of King Xerxes of Persia, the novel begins with the kidnapping of a young girl and then flashes forward several years to focus on Darya, a young slave who is uncertain of her origins. The story follows Darya and her free friend Parvaneh from service in the household of a Persian army captain to positions in Xer...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     🕮     Meira Drazin is the author of Honey and Me , a forthcoming middle grade novel from Scholastic. Even before she got that book deal, she won the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award for the unpublished work. She was at the 2016 Association of Jewish Libraries conference in Charleston, SC to receive her award. We sat down with a few members of the award committee for a quick chat. INVITATION :  As you hear in th is podcast episode, you are invited to participate in How Is This Book Different? , a joint project of the Association of Jewish Libr aries , the Jewish Book Council , and Call Me Ish mael . Between March 27-April 4, 2017, call 774-325-0503 with a story about your a Jewish book that matters to your life ! CREDITS: Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel   Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries   Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band   Face...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST    |    BUY THE BOOK     🕮    Susan Krawitz won the 2015 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award for her story Viva Rose , which will be published by Holiday House in the spring of 2017. The Manuscript Award is presented annually by the Association of Jewish Libraries to an unpublished work for ages 8-13 that has broad appeal to readers and presents Jewish life in a positive light. As the press release explains,  "Set in El Paso, Texas in 1915, Viva, Rose tells the story of Rose Solomon’s older brother Abraham who runs off to join Pancho Villa's revolutionary group. When Rose tries to find Abraham and convince him to come home, she is kidnapped and taken to Villa's hideout. There she meets a cast of characters based on real people who traveled with Villa and the fictional, spoiled Dorotea, Villa's young charge. The feisty Rose learns to ride a horse, to stand up for herself and, along the way, discovers ...

READ THE ARTICLE     🕮    I wrote an article for Multicultural Kid Blogs about Jewish Kidlit Awards, and you can read it here . It gives details about the Sydney Taylor Book and Manuscript Awards, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards. If I do say so myself, it's a good comprehensive round-up.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     🕮    Karen Propp discusses her work in progress, Freestyle , a story of Jewish female swimming champs in Europe during WWII. The unpublished work won the 2013 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.  Freestyle is based on the true story of champion swimmer Judith Deutsch and the Viennese Hakoah swim team of the 1930s, familiar to some from the documentary film  Watermarks . Despite being selected by Austria to swim in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Deutsch and her teammates boycotted the Olympics to protest the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The novel covers two years in the life of Elly Hirsch,  Propp’s fictional incarnation of Deutsch. The Award committee felt that Freestyle with its strong sense of history, sympathetic characters, and little known story, would appeal to a wide audience and epitomize the ideals of Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family series. Fr...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST    |    BUY THE BOOK     🕮    I'm just back from the 2010 Book Expo America trade show in NYC, where I recorded lots of interesting interviews. It will take me a while to edit them, but lucky for you guys I still have several recordings from last summer to post in the meantime. This interview turns out to be unfortunately timely, with Louisiana so much in the spotlight right now due to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Last summer, when we all thought Hurricane Katrina was the worst thing that could happen to New Orleans, I interviewed Nachama Liss-Levinson, author of the 2009 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award winning title When the Hurricane Came to New Orlean s. Being unpublished (thus a "Manuscript Award" winner), you can't read it yet. But I'm sure after hearing from awards chair Aileen Grossberg and from Nechama herself, you will want to! (Sorry for any angst caused by this situation!) [NOTE: The book has subseq...