children's & YA recommendations on the go
Savannah Brown, author of The Truth About Keeping Secrets, explains all about ESCAPRIL, a community social media poetry project that encourages participants to write and post a poem a day throughout April.
ACHUKA plans to get on board to support and promote this – why not join in too?
Hip Hop artist and debut poet Karl Nova was announced the winner of CLiPPA 2018 at the Olivier Theatre on the South Bank this afternoon, to a great cheer from the young people in the audience – clearly a highly popular winner.
Rising Stars, a poetry collection including young poets and performers from under-represented communities, was highly commended.
Grace Nichols, Poet and Chair of the CLiPPA 2018 judges praised the winning book: “This book really stood out for me with its refreshing use of the rap genre, its musicality, its immediacy and thoughtful reflections on the creative process. Karl Nova’s poems ring true with a sincere charm that children and young people can relate to and that may inspire their own writing.”
Rhythm and Poetry, Karl’s debut collection, includes poems drawn from his extensive work as a poetry educator and the many workshops he holds in schools. It has a refreshing directness, honesty and authenticity which encourages children to see poetry in the everyday, explores the musicality of the medium and demonstrates the currency and significance of rap as an art form. The book is published by Caboodle, the publishing arm of Authors Abroad, which operates on a 50/50 share of costs and profits with published authors.
This year, with the support of the Siobhan Dowd Trust, CLPE have ensured 350 free copies of the shortlisted poetry books will be sent to teachers nationally to celebrate poetry with children.
Karl Nova received the award and a cheque for £1,000 in front of a packed audience of poets, educators, publishers, hundreds of shadowing school children and media at The National Theatre. The shortlisted poets all performed on stage alongside children from the CLiPPA Shadowing Scheme, whose winning performances were selected from hundreds of competition entries. Everyone who attended received an advance copy of the new anthology from National Poetry Day, Poetry for a Change.
CLiPPA is made possible by the generous support of ALCS, Siobhan Dowd Trust and St Olave’s Fund.
Films of the shortlisted poets performing and teaching resources are available at www.clpe.org.uk/poetryline
The first ever official National Poetry Day anthology, Poetry For a Change, is packed with an exciting variety of poems for children by a top team of fantastic poets, including the National Poetry Day Ambassadors, who bring poetry alive all year round.
It includes new poems by Deborah Alma, Joseph Coelho, Sally Crabtree, Jan Dean, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Chrissie Gittins, Matt Goodfellow, Sophie Herxheimer, Michaela Morgan, Brian Moses, Abigail Parry, Rachel Piercey, Rachel Rooney, Joshua Siegal and Kate Wakeling (winner of the CLiPPA, 2017).
Each featured poet has also chosen a favourite poem to share, providing readers the chance to (re-) discover works by Lola Ridge, Christina Rossetti, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar among others at the same time as discovering new and inspirational poems.
CLOSING: 9am GMT on Friday 1st June 2018
In partnership with the House of Illustration and the Betjeman Poetry Prize, Lauren Child, Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2017-2019, announces an international illustration competition:
An international illustration prize for illustrators aged 18- 25 years
Illustrate a poem by a Betjeman Poetry Prize finalist
£1000 first prize, plus prizes for commended illustrators
Top 12 illustrators will be commissioned to create further work to be exhibited at St Pancras International station, London, in September 2018
Judges: Lauren Child, award-winning author and illustrator; director of the House of Illustration Colin McKenzie and Imtiaz Dharker, Queen’s Gold Medal winning poet and artist
Competition opens February 1st 2018 and closes 9am GMT on Friday June 1st 2018
HOW TO ENTER
Create an illustration for one poem of your choice from the 12 poems listed HERE
Each illustration entered must be accompanied by the poem title
We require full-page illustrations in black and white. Do not illustrate around the words. The illustrations can be in any medium suitable for reproduction. However, all entries must be appropriate for the dimensions given here: Your illustrations can either bleed off the page or be surrounded by a white border for a trimmed page size of 210 x 297mm (A4)
Original artwork should not be submitted. You should submit your illustration at 150 dpi, Greyscale, JPEG (jpeg setting 8). If you are shortlisted, we will contact you for the master artwork. Master artwork must be a 300dpi Greyscale TIFF
To enter, email your artwork as an attachment to . In the body of the email you should give your name, age, address and a contact telephone number. You MUST state to which poem your illustration corresponds
Pay your entry fee of £15 by PayPal HERE. The email used for the PayPal payment MUST be the same used to send your illustration
Your entry will be confirmed by email once we have received both your payment and your illustration. Original artwork sent by post will not be considered
Artists may enter more than once with a separate entry fee for each illustration
The 12 winning illustrators will be commissioned to create a fresh illustration for the Lauren Child Poetry Illustration Prize exhibition of poems and winning illustrations to be held on the Upper Concourse at St Pancras International, London in September 2018
Read the terms and conditions HERE
Any problems, email
The final deadline for entries to the competition is 9am GMT on Friday 1st June 2018
Congratulations to indie Otter-Barry Books, publisher of half the books on this years CLiPPA shortlist, announced by CLPE today.
Established in 2003, the CLiPPA encourages and celebrates outstanding poetry published for children.
The shortlist is evenly split between 3 previous winners and 3 debut collections, with 3 out of the 6 shortlisted books coming from independent publisher Otter-Barry Books.
Louise Johns-Shepherd, Chief Executive, CLPE said “CLiPPA is leading an essential movement to build on the current huge popularity of poetry and the growing poetry market to ensure that poetry for children is acknowledged as an essential part of this landscape. The shortlist recognises not just great children’s poets but great poets full stop. We want as many people as possible to know about these wonderful works and CLiPPA, the Shadowing Scheme and the resources we produce all come together to make sure that they receive the high profile they deserve.”
This year there was an increase in submissions of almost 70%, from 19 books from 9 publishers in 2017 to 32 books from 19 publishers in 2018.
The full shortlist is:
The judging panel, chaired by CLiPPA 2003 winner, Grace Nichols, included Kate Wakeling, poet and CLiPPA 2017 winner for Moon Juice; Imogen Lycett Green, Director of the Betjeman Prize for Young Poet; Charlotte Hacking, CLPE Learning Programme Leader; and Anthony Anaxagorou, poet, poetry educator and founder of Out-Spoken Press.
The winner of the 2018 Award will be announced on 22nd June in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre in London. This will be the 4th year that CLPE has partnered with the National Theatre to deliver the Poetry Show which will include performances from children participating in the Shadowing Scheme and the shortlisted poets.
The winning poet receives £1000.
The free Shadowing Scheme to involve schools in the Poetry Award 2018 is launched alongside the announcement of the shortlist. The scheme has run for 3 years, reaching more than 600 teachers and 14,000 children.
To support schools to take poetry into the classroom, videos of poets performing from the shortlisted books and talking about their work and high quality teaching resources,
are available free of charge to all schools www.clpe.org.uk/poetryline. Shadowing schools are invited to apply for free tickets to attend the Award Ceremony.
New for 2018: CLPE will be partnering with ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) to educate teachers and children about copyright and about the rights of writers.
This is a fantastic opportunity. Can’t recommend it highly enough.The resources produced by the CLPE are always superb.
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Bring poetry to life in your class with free resources and win the chance to perform at the National Theatre! |
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Regularly published and awarded in America since the 1970s, Eloise Greenfield is little known in the UK. That’s about to change. In April Tiny Owl will be publishing Thinker: My Puppy Poet And Me. The African-American author’s poetry collection will be illustrated by Iranian artist Ehsan Abdollahi. The title is part of the publisher’s wider programme of promoting under-represented voices and cultures in literature.
Eloise Greenfield has written 47 books for children in a career spanning nearly 60 years. She is known for her focus on positive portrayals of black culture and family life and was recently awarded the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. This prestigious award celebrates an African American author or illustrator who has made a significant and lasting contribution to literature.
The book will be published in April.
A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.
Boorn in 1997 and raised in East London, Amina Jama is a Somali-British writer and member of the Barbican Young Poets collective. She has had worked published by the Sula Collective, an online magazine ‘for and by people of colour’.
There are several examples of her spoken word poetry on YouTube, including this powerful piece performed for an adult audience.
‘The House At The End Of The Street’ is one of the best poems in the Rising Stars collection
One of the ironies of an anthology of poets known for their spoken word work is that it contains so many poems that do not rely on performance for their impact. This may be because the poets’ performed poetry is usually more adult in theme. Whatever the reason, ‘The House At The End Of The Street’, about a best friend moving home, is one such example of a poem that has full adequacy as printed words on a page.
Written in rhyming couplets it is lightly descriptive in a manner that belies the emotion behind it.
Leila was my best friend since Year Two.
For years we got each other through.
I was there when her dad left her mum,
I plaited her hair and stroked her heart until she was numb.
Now she was moving out from her house at the end of the street
and another kid would come into class and take her seat.
I also like the ambiguity at the start of the poem. Why are there ‘officers and firemen going in and out’? What of the ‘distant burnt smell’?
There is a welcome sense of humour in ‘Car Ride’, a poem about a father who always gets the words to songs wrong:
He would sing, ‘The Grand Old Duke of Pork…’
‘No, Dad!’ we’d scream. “It’s York!.”
No matter how many times we’d tell him
that there was no Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Fart,
and the song was not Row, Row, Row Your Goat…
Links to pieces about the other poets in the collection:
A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.
Jay Hulme is a young transgender performance poet from Leicester, now based in Bristol. Another SLAMbassadors 2015 winner, he has already self-published two solo collections and has been featured in various anthologies. He also publishes on Tumblr and has recently established a Patreon page, primarily to help him offer his services for free to disadvantaged schools, libraries, and charities.
This poem about being transgender is not included in Rising Stars.
Last year he was featured in a DAZE item on up-and-coming spoken word artists:
Hulme talks about a range of topics, from life in the Midlands to his first week experiences at university. Hulme’s poem I am a man is a personal address as a transgender man to the problems that transgender people come up against every day. Ranging from pronoun mix-ups to death threats, Hulme’s frank spoken word performance, which is both touching and educational, is refreshing. Hulme shows just how important spoken word is to the new generation of people using the genre to address personal issues and share them with a wider audience.
Hulme’s style is direct and uncomplicated. Young readers will not struggle to understand any of his poems. The first of his eight poems included in Rising Stars, titled ‘Community’ with a knowing irony, describes growing up in an anonymous neighbourhood that will be recognisable by many people living in the suburbs.
We were told somebody started
a Neighbourhood Watch,
but I never met anyone
I know for sure was a neighbour.
we were all just figures, behind net curtains.
In the winters I’d walk the dog round the block,
hood up, head down, letting the world pass me by.
This is a moment to mention that the book has three different illustrators; Riya Chowdhury, Eleanor Chuah and Joe Manners. The latter is Hulme’s illustrator and I love the way he has interpreted this opening poem.
Hulme is particularly good at beginning with a prosaic everyday sensations then building it into a poetic one using simple techniques such as repetition and word pattern. ‘I Thought I Was Small’ begins
I thought I was small
when I first went to London
and ends
When I didn’t notice the heart
built into my body.
When I didn’t notice the universe
held within my soul.
I thought I was small.
Manners’ illustration for this poem is another particularly good one.
‘New Words’ is rhythmic and rhyming in a very self-assured way, and ‘Sunset at Brean Down’ is a lyric of beautiful timelessness
We walked on the shoreline,
My old dog and me,
Our feet being rushed
By the rippling sea.
The whole poem is very well done.
Hulme’s contribution to the collection ends with the thought-provoking ‘The Border’, about a walk with the ghosts from the past.
I wished they’d teach me
what stands before me, what types of mystery lie ahead.
But they stay silent. I forgive the
secrets guarded by the dead.
This is again very fine. I love the enjambment in the final two lines.
For features on the other Rising Stars poets see:
Ruth Awolola
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Abigail Cook
A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.
Abigail Cook is a SLAMbassadors-winning performance poet from London, and currently a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
The opening poem in Abigail’s section of Rising Stars:
Some of Cook’s other spoken (and sung) work can be found on Soundcloud.
As that opening poem suggests (‘My body is the garden I grew up in’ … ‘My hair is the ocean’… ‘My shoulders are bird’s wings’) Cook’s poetry is rich in metaphor.
‘Storm of a Girl’ begins
I have two storms inside me
I call them my mother and father.
Whereas much young writing in this style can be overly abstract and lacking in concrete detail, Cook conjures up the experience of adolescence extremely vividly – especially those first times of being away from (but still close by) the family home, staying up late under starry skies.
In the second poem, ‘Brother’
One night
we lay on the driveway
and counted every star
in the sky
plucked them and placed them in our pockets
there to light the way for the darkness ahead
Again, on ‘Night-time in the garden’
We wash ourselves in raindrops
sleep covered in leaves,
count every star in the sky,
watch the world go by.
Cook’s final poem ‘Summer Day’ is her strongest, perfectly capturing that best of all coming-of-age sensations: a powerful sense of benign, innocently-equipped omnipotence.
The summer was long and hot.
We sat outside in our pyjamas
whilst the world ended.
…
We spoke as if the sun would never rise again.
We spoke with laughter dripping from our lips,
trying to be braver,
and decided we would save the world.
With sticks as our swords
and sharpened ends
we saved the day
again.
Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.
Ruth Awolola
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
