There’s a New Award in Town

Are you one of those people who find the Newbery Awards a tad too elitist? That’s what two women who blog about children’s literature thought when they launched the Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards (Cybils) in 2006. And since then, they’ve amassed quite a loyal following.

Anne Boles Levy (below), a freelance writer from Chicago, unveiled her blog BookBuds.net in 2004, and Kelly Herold, an associate professor of Russian literature at Grinnell College in Iowa, started her book review blog, Big A little a (kidslitinformation.blogspot.com), almost two years ago.

Although the two had never met in person, Boles Levy emailed Herold with the idea of starting a more “middle ground” children’s lit award with a different twist: all the judges had to blog about children’s and YA literature.

Now in its second year, the Cybils on February 14 unveiled its awards for 2007. Surprisingly, the prize for the young adult category went to Barry Lyga’s Boy Toy (Houghton), a wrenching story about a 12-year-old boy who was seduced by his history teacher. The book beat Sherman Alexie’s heavily favored The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown, 2007), a National Book Award winner.

Cybils judges—who include the authors Sarah Miller and Mitali Perkins—said Lyga’s prose is “unflinching, and the result is heartbreaking and unforgettable.”

The Cybils team hands out 10 awards in different genres of children’s literature split by age group. Ibtisam Barakat’s Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood(Farrar), a haunting account of the Six Day War, won for middle grade/YA nonfiction; Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday (Hyperion), a spoof of science-fiction novels, won the sci-fi category in the younger age group; and Janice N. Harrington’s The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County (Farrar), took top honors in fiction picture books. For more information, visit blog.cybils.com.