Author and poet Susan Taylor Brown has a contest for kids to check out. She has teamed up with a local non-profit organization to offer a $1,000 scholarship for kids ages 13-18 who create a book trailer for her novel-in-verse, Hugging the Rock (Tricycle Press, 2006). You’ll find the details here.
Rules
- Create a video book trailer
- U.S resident only between 13 and 18 years of age (as of the close of the contest)
- 30 seconds to 2 minutes in length and in a standard video format (.wmv, .mov, .avi, .mp4)
- Your own creation, NO copyrighted material
- Include a brief description of the process you followed
The judging will be completed by Susan (the author), Laura Mancuso (Marketing & Publicity Manager, Tricycle Press, a division of Random House) and Naomi Bates (Northwest High School Library). Judging will be based on the following criteria.
- Creativity (50%)
- Consistency with the book (25%)
- Fit and finish (25%)
The deadline is Dec. 15, 2009, so get rolling… The award will be announced in January.
Hugging the Rock was an ALA Notable children’s book (2007) and is a powerful story of a young girl and her father coping with the mental illness and departure of their mother and wife. Like Sonya Sones’s verse novel Stop Pretending, What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (HarperCollins, 1999), Brown doesn’t shy away from sharing difficult emotions in spare and gripping poems. Fellow blogger Jen Robinson wrote (at Jen Robinson's Book Page), “This book packs a lot into relatively few words. Susan Taylor Brown offers insights into life with a mentally ill parent, how fathers parent differently from mothers, how personally kids take any parental rejection, how 'sometimes dads are better moms than moms are,' and how, ultimately, people adapt to changing circumstances. Hugging the Rock is beautifully written, and I give it my highest recommendation."
I know that making book trailers is a HUGE trend right now, but I'm not aware of too many created for books of poetry, so I love that KIDS have this opportunity to dig into poetry and technology. I hope their entries will be posted and shared somewhere, so we can all enjoy them!
Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2009. All rights reserved.
Image credit: cleanreads.blogspot.com
3 comments:
This is a great idea! My blog is sort of the opposite, it explores poetry in bar environments. All the baggage and excitement that people bring to bars needs to be written about. Check it out @ www.baretry.blogspot.com
I love contests for teens. Such a smart idea for a wonderful book! I hope you get lots of entries, Susan.
there's plenty of scope for sharing on the internet. DIY!
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