The Winner of the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

is JonArno Lawson’s Black Stars in a White Night Sky. Illus. Sherwin Tjia. (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2006). Now I loved his earlier book, The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask and concrete poetry so am very eager to get my hands on this one. But that may not be so easy. There is only one very expensive used copy at amazon, none at barnesandnoble or abebooks. I could order it from indigo, but they say it will take 3-5 weeks to ship. I’m going to keep looking.

Honor books (all of which I have):

Jorge Argueta. Talking with Mother Earth/Hablando con Madre Tierra. Illus. Lucía Angela Pérez. (Toronto: Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2006);

Helen Frost. The Braid. (New York: Frances Foster/Farrar Straus: 2006);

Walter Dean Myers. Jazz. Illus. Christopher Myers (New York: Holiday House, 2006) and Walter Dean Myers. Street Love (New York: Amistad/HarperTempest, 2006).

For more about the award go to this press release which also has a link to a related article by the judges (Angela Sorby, Joseph T. Thomas Jr., and Richard Flynn) in the forthcoming September 2007 issue of The Lion and the Unicorn.

Thanks to Lissa Paul for posting about this on child_lit.

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