Me, 10 years ago: I will never let myself own enough books to run out of shelf room!
Me now:
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USING BANNED BOOKS TO SELL READING TO KIDS
Justin Stanley founded the Uprise Books Project with a very simple mission: distribute banned or challenged books to underprivileged kids to encourage them to read. A Winner of our 2013 Innovations in Reading Prize, Stanley shares his personal experiences of poverty, the difficulties of championing banned books to schools, and how an Innovations in Reading Prize is helping propel his important work forward.
National Book Foundation: What inspired your Innovations in Reading-winning program?
Justin Stanley: My family didn’t have much when I was a kid. My younger brother and I were raised by a single mother and when we were in elementary school we were completely dependent on government and community help to make ends meet. I knew what government cheese tasted like and the various ways people looked at you when your mom pulled out a book of food stamps in the grocery store line, what it was like to be we-have-to-skip-the-electric-bill-this-month-if-we-want-to-eat poor.
I also remember the day in second grade when I came to school to find a group of strangers from some place called “RIF” standing behind a table of books, telling us kids that we could have one. For free. I couldn’t tell you what specific book I chose that day, but I’ve never forgotten how great it felt to bring it home.
Continue reading Justin’s interview here.
Want to know more about NBF’s Innovations in Reading Prize? Click here.
Censorship is most often being used not to challenge racism and sexism and homophobia, but to reinforce it.
Lit Crawl NYC is this Wednesday! We’re presenting Literary Pictionary hosted by 5 Under 35 Honoree Alex Gilvarry and featuring our friends from Hypen Magazine and Armchair/Shotgun. The evening is packed with fantastic bookish goodness from your favorite writers and publishers. Find the full schedule here.
50 tattoo tributes to the books you’ll (hopefully) love forever.
More National Book Award Winners and Finalists that are among the most frequently challenged in the books. Follow Banned Books Week here.
Why would you ever think that? Me, 10 years ago: I will never have enough shelves to not have to double stack my books. Me now:
Me, years ago: i will never read books… books are boring.
Me, now:
Which one are you?
We all know how important it is to inspire a love for reading early on in young children — and one place that owns this space is Barbershop Books, a community-based program started in Harlem that creates child-friendly spaces in barbershops across the U.S. for young boys to read in.
Basketball gets bookish TOMORROW!
Join us for The Other NBA 2016: Writers vs. Publishers tomorrow, and you can help us raise money for BookUp, the National Book Foundation’s youth reading program.
For just $20, you can see some of award winning writers play basketball against publishing powerhouses, including Jonny Diamond (Lit Hub), Katie Freeman (Riverhead), Mitchell S. Jackson (The Residue Years), Téa Obreht (The Tiger’s Wife), and Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Heaven). There’ll be drinks and snacks at the game donated by Brooklyn Brewery, Archer Roose, and Shake Shack.
The Other NBA, sponsored by Out of Print and Litsy, will help BookUp students develop a lifelong passion for reading and start their first personal libraries.
CHECK OUT the National Book Award Finalists who Amazon chose for their 2014 Best Books of the Year!
Station Eleven, Best Science-Fiction novel
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Best Graphic Memoir
PLUS– Several of our 2014 LONGLISTED Books are also Amazon Editor Selects:
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digitial Revolution
Greenglass House
Skink– No Surrender
How can you even know what the world is until you’ve got those stories in you?
A patron of Innovations in Reading Prize winner Street Books, discussing Lord of the Flies, 1984, and The Grapes of Wrath.
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