The Red Ear Blows Its Nose: Poems for Children and Others by Robert Schechter (Word Galaxy, 2023), has been selected by the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee for The Best Children’s Books of the Year 2024 Edition (Books Published in 2023), published by the Bank Street College of Education. This debut collection of children’s poems has previously received starred reviews in School Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews, and a Common Sense Media Selection Checkmark and five star review.
“Children and adults alike will enjoy bouncing through the vivacious rhythms and the breadth of surprising, marvelous ideas. These are for reading out loud, to laugh at, to muse on, and to grow up with” said School Library Journal in its starred review of The Red Ear Blows Its Nose.
The Bank Street College’s Children’s Book Committee (CBC) was founded more than 100 years ago to help parents, teachers, and librarians choose the books that children will find captivating and transforming. Every year it produces comprehensive annotated book lists for children aged infant through 18, selecting approximately just 600 books out of 6,000.
In choosing books for its annual list, reviewers consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Each book accepted for the list is read and reviewed by at least two committee members and then discussed by the committee as a whole. According to the Bank Street website, the PDF of last year’s edition of the list has been downloaded 6,647 times since May 2023.
In related news, The Red Ear Blows Its Nose is a contender in the School Library Journal Heavy Medal Blog for its Mock Newbery List, as well as part of a discussion about the Mock Newberys on the SLJ blog called 100 Scope Notes by Travis Jonker. Mr. Jonker notes that The Red Ear Blows Its Nose tops the Goodreads Mock Newbery List.
The Newbery Award is an annual award founded in 1921 by the American Library Association and is one of the most prestigious awards for children’s books. A Mock Newbery List or Election is modeled after the criteria used by the actual Newbery Committee.
Robert Schechter‘s award-winning poetry for children has appeared in Highlights for Children, Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, the Caterpillar, Blast Off, Countdown, Orbit, and more than a dozen anthologies published by Bloomsbury, National Geographic, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Emma Press, and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Robert’s poems for adults have won both the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the X. J. Kennedy Parody Award, and his verse has often appeared in the Washington Post Style Invitational (where he is a former Rookie and Loser of the Year) and in the Spectator magazine’s weekly humor competition. The Red Ear Blows It Nose: Poems for Children and Others is his first book.
Related Links:
www.bobschechter.com – author website
Word Galaxy – publisher
ISSUU – read the entire book online in digital format with one click
Edelweiss – request a digital galley, US Trade
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