05 Mar MARCH! MARCH! MARCH!
It only happens every three years that both the Lee Bennett Hopkins/Penn State Poetry Award and the Lee Bennett Hopkins/International Reading Association (IRA) Promising New Poet Award are given. This year the Penn State Award goes to Kate Coombs for WATER SINGS BLUE: OCEAN POEMS, illustrated by Meilo So (Chronicle Books):
“For the water sings blue and the sky does too, and the
sea lets you fly like a gull.”
The IRA Award goes to Guadalupe Garcia McCall for UNDER THE MESQUITE, (Lee & Low), a tender verse novel which Alma Flor Ada calls “A magnificent new voice in Latino literature.” When Lupita, a high school freshman, one of eight children born in Mexico, learns her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Lupita’s courage to deal with a life tragedy is revealed.
Two enormous projects are underway, both in revision stages. Revision — part of the writing process I detest until it is over with. It is hard, horrid, cruel — yet, at times, exhilarating.
Can April be looming so close ahead? On April 13, I turn 75…a number too difficult to digest. Yet, as Sondheim wrote in FOLLIES – “I’m still here!”
And looking back – I’m glad I’ve been THERE.
Several exciting things are on the horizon. Hopefully by April when I am older and hopefully wiser, I’ll have several surprising things to announce.
Life is filled with surprise. Hoo-ray for that.