Poet and Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi, four-time National Book Award Poetry Finalist Carl Phillips, Elbrun Kimmelman, and National Book Award Poetry Winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin at a Library of America reception in Merwin’s honor hosted by Peter and Elbrun Kimmelman. Photo by Helen Houghton.
On April 15, our BookUpTexas students went to Houston’s Brazos Bookstore to see Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni read from and discuss her work. Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, and teacher, and she was a National Book Awards Fiction Judge in 2000. See more photos from the reading on our website.
Photo by Francine Parker





We’re thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s Innovations in Reading Prizes:
City National Bank for Reading Is the Way Up (Los Angeles, CA)
Little Free Library (Hudson, WI)
The Uni Project (New York, NY)
The Uprise Books Project (Vancouver, WA)
Worldreader (Seattle, WA)
To learn more about the Innovations in Reading Prize and each of the winners, click here.
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1998 National Book Award Poetry Winner Gerald Stern’s latest collection, In Beauty Bright (W.W. Norton, 2012), was selected by School Library Journal as an Adult Book 4 Teens! Click here to read the National Poetry Month post on SLJ.com, and click here to view Gerald Stern’s page on our National Book Awards Poetry blog.
Innovations in Reading Prize winner James Patterson calls for action to save our books, bookstores, and libraries. Read more in Publishers Weekly.

Children’s book author and illustrator E.L. Konigsburg has passed away at age 83. Konigsburg was nominated for the National Book Award for Children’s Books twice, in 1974 for A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and in 1980 for Throwing Shadows.
Click here to read her obituary in The New York Times.
Click here to read Judy Blume’s acceptance speech for the 2004 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which she dedicated to Konigsburg and other children’s book writers.
Photo © Ron Kunzman
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