February 20 is Deadline for Innovations in Reading Prize

Feb. 14, 2013 - PRLog -- The postmark application deadline for the National Book Foundation's fifth Innovations in Reading Prize (http://www.nationalbook.org/innovations_in_reading.html) is February 20, 2013. The prize awards up to $2,500 each to individuals and institutions—or partnerships between the two—that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading.  

In support of its effort to promote literature to diverse audiences, the National Book Foundation seeks applications from individuals and institutions that demonstrate a similar commitment. The most important criteria for selecting winners are creativity, risk-taking, and a visionary quality, as well as a novel way of presenting books and literature. The Prize is less focused on the promotion of basic literacy and the pedagogy of reading than on the promotion of literary reading for its own sake.

Applications for the Innovations in Reading Prize are available for completion online. Questions should be directed to Katie McDonough at kmcdonough@nationalbook.org.

Winners will be announced to the public on May 8, 2013 and featured in an article to be included in the Foundation's monthly eNewsletter, posted on Facebook, and tweeted to over 241,000 followers, as well as published on a special Innovations in Reading page on the National Book Foundation's website. Winners will also receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City to attend a special luncheon at the Ford Foundation, where they will present their work to funders and other people in the field, as well as the National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street.

In its first four years of awarding the Prize, the Foundation received approximately 725 applications from all across the country. Innovations in Reading Prize winners have included individuals, such as fifteen-year-old Lilli Leight who established a “giving library” for the children at a Miami homeless shelter, developed a “reading ecosystem” within her community to continually stock the library, and started a teen book club that gives her peers the opportunity to discuss books, meet authors, and volunteer at the homeless shelter; Elaine McElhaney, a Sunday School teacher who started a library for the community at the Mount Olive Baptist Church in rural Hopkins, South Carolina;  and Burton Freeman, a retired attorney whose My Own Book program helps inner-city New York students build their own private libraries. Organizations that have won are Bookends, a book-centric television program for teens done in partnership with the  Poudre River Public Library District, Poudre School District’s Channel 10, and a group of teens from the Interesting Reader Society (IRS) library teen advisory group, located in Fort Collins, Colorado; Electric Literature/Electric Publisher, located in Brooklyn, New York, an upstart publishing company and literary journal that uses new media and innovative distribution to keep storytelling a vital force in popular culture; and Fathers Bridging the Miles, a program of Read to Me International that provides children of incarcerated fathers in the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona the opportunity to develop a love of reading by recording inmates reading children’s books onto CDs. To view all winners of the Innovations in Reading prize, visit http://www.nationalbook.org/innovations_in_reading.html.

Innovations in Reading is supported by a generous from Levenger.