At today’s Children’s Book & Author Breakfast, two bookstores—the Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo., and Children’s Book World in Los Angeles—will receive the 2017 WNBA Pannell Award. Established in 1983 and cosponsored by the Women’s National Book Association and Penguin Young Readers Group, the annual award recognizes two independent stores—one general bookstore and one children’s specialty bookstore—that enhance their communities and foster a love of reading with exceptional creativity. The Pannell Award chair Susan Knopf works with a jury of five publishing professionals to select the winners.
The jurors praised the Bookworm of Edwards’s initiatives that include the Adopt-a-Reader program: customers sign up to fund monthly delivery of a book to an underserved child in the community. It is an offshoot of the Literary Concierge program, a subscription service that delivers individually selected books to customers’ children and other recipients. The store also offers free book talk services to school media specialists and educators in the local school district, which eliminated librarian positions several years ago due to budget cuts.
Owner Nicole Magistro is especially proud of is her store’s annual writing contest for kids in grades 3–12. The winning stories are collected in a bound book, which receives a proper in-store launch. “This is the most rewarding thing we do,” she says. “Seeing the look on kids’ faces when they are reading to a packed house and realizing that they really can be published authors is amazing.”
Jurors lauded Children’s Book World for its commitment to carrying a diverse selection of titles, and to the idea of a bookstore as a place of discovery. “When I opened the store, I wanted it to be librarylike,” says owner Sharon Hearn, “where I offered books in all categories and have a staff who would assist customers, but children and adults could easily browse.”
The store hosts a quarterly Poetry Slam for aspiring poets ages 8–13. “This is a fun opportunity.... Perhaps one of them will be our next Kwame Alexander, Sharon Creech, or Lin-Manuel Miranda,” says store manager Brein Lopez.
Other store initiatives include a Teen Readers Council, whose members read books before publication and review them; a Readers & Writers Rock! program, supported by a James Patterson grant, which brings authors into low-income schools; and new this year is Reading Gives You Super Powers! initiated by a donation from Dav Pilkey, which enables students from low-income schools to visit the store and receive a book of their own choosing.” For many children, it’s their first visit to a bookshop, and the first book they’ve owned,” says Hearn.
Today, 8–9:30 a.m. The Children’s Book & Author Breakfast, at the Special Events Hall.
