Interview with Caroline Arnold

Do you have plans to keep chickens after learning about their care along with Room 6? A number of years ago, before I moved to Los Angeles, I lived in the country with my family and we kept a flock of chickens. Watching the children in Room 6 care for their chickens reminded me of this experience. Now that I …

Interview with Julie Kim

What was the inspiration for Where’s Halmoni? My inspiration was mainly my children. I wanted to give them something that mirrored their experience of being part of two cultures, old and new, and both familiar and unfamiliar. In what ways does Where’s Halmoni reflect your own life? After I finished making this book, I realized that I had encapsulated my own experience of …

Interview with Neal Shusterman

Congrats! We’d love to know: how did you come up with the idea for Scythe?  After many years teen dystopia, I wanted to do something that flipped it upside down. Rather than a tale of a dystopian world, I thought “What would be the consequences of a truly perfect world?”  A world without war, poverty, crime, or disease.  A world …

The 2017 Cybils Winners

There’s really not much to say, here at the announcement of the winners, except a HUGE Thank You (!) to all our volunteers: chairs, panelists, and judges. We could NOT have done it without you!  Board Books Changing Faces: Meet Happy Bear by Nathan Thoms, illustrated by Carles Ballesteros Harry N Abrams Nominated by: Charlotte Learning about facial expressions and …

CYBILS Winners TOMORROW!

Now that the excitement from the ALA Youth Media Awards have died down (we really are living in a super-fast news cycle!) (who are we kidding: we’re still excited!) we want to remind you that we’ll have yet ANOTHER reason to be excited about children’s literature: At 9:30 a.m. PST we’ll announce this year’s CYBILS winners!! You’ll want to come …

2017 Finalist Reactions!

We love seeing them! Here’s what we found across social media over the past couple of days:        Ahhhhhhhh The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart is a Cybils Finalist (in the Elementary/MG Speculative Fiction category: https://t.co/pUeBF9dRTb )!!!!!!!!!!!!!!       I am so, SO thrilled and over-the-moon about this!!! @KidsBloomsbury @bloomsburykids https://t.co/erjE1QctrC     — Stephanie Burgis 🐲 …

2017 Cybils Finalists

2017 was a difficult year, all around. Participation was down (we had to put Audiobooks on hiatus!), several judges and category chairs had personal or family crises, and we had issues with getting access to all the books. It wasn’t easy for the Cybils this year.  However, we rallied — we had 1426 books nominated across all the categories — we …

2017 Public Nominations are Closed

Thank you to everyone who nominated for the 2017 Cybils Awards. Nominations from the public are now closed for the year. The judges are already at work reading and evaluating all the wonderful books nominated. Finalists will be announced January 1. We are now accepting submissions from authors and publishers through October 25, for books which were missed during the …

Nominate NOW!

The 2017 Cybils nominations are now live! Some quick reminders: First off, be sure to check out our category descriptions. If you don’t know where the book should go, please read through the descriptions to help you decide. If you’re still not quite sure, make your best guess, and we can straighten things out behind the scenes. Take a minute …

It’s Sepember 30th Already?

And you know what that means, don’t you? Only 24 more hours (more or less) until the Cybils nominations open!!  I’m sure you’ve been thinking long and hard over the past few weeks about which books you want to nominate in every category, and you’re going to stay up super late (or get up super early; or maybe you just …