Cybils Award for Poetry

The “Cybils” award was established in 2006 to recognize the role of bloggers in the “kidlitosphere,” the online children’s literature world. “Cybils,” an acronym for the “Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards,” are given in a variety of genre and format categories, including poetry. For more information go to: http://www.cybils.com/


Recent recipient:


Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto
by Paul B. Janeczko
Candlewick Press


“’I am a watcher/sitting with those about to die.’ These are the words of Elisha Schorr/25565 as imagined by poet Paul Janeczko. In Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto, we all become watchers, viewing snapshots of the Holocaust, one after the other, each one deepening the grief and raising questions to which there are no answers. We watch, but we also hear the story of Terezin, voice by voice, insistent and haunting, so that the effect by the end of the collection is almost choral. For each song of despair, there is a concordant and essential song of anger, tenderness or resignation; like a recurring melodic theme, the voice of one child appears and fades and appears again. We hear the violin of one victim playing ‘as only the heartbroken can play.’”


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