CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The first winner of the new Gryphon Award for Children's Literature is Douglas Florian, for his collection of poetry, "bow wow meow meow: it's rhyming cats and dogs" (Harcourt, 2003).
The Gryphon Award, which comes with a $1,000 prize, is given by the Center for Children's Books at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Established last May, the award will be given annually to the author of an outstanding English language work of fiction or non-fiction for which the primary audience is children in kindergarten through fourth grade.
Two Gryphon Award "honor books" also were named - "Snowed in With Grandmother Silk," by Carol Fenner (Dial, 2003), and "Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist: Lunch Walks Among Us," by Jim Benton (Simon & Schuster, 2003).
According to the selection committee, the winning title best exemplifies those qualities that successfully bridge the gap in difficulty between "read-aloud" and "read-alone" titles.
The Gryphon Award was conceived as a way to focus attention on "transitional reading," an area of literature for youth that, despite being crucial to the successful transition of children from new readers to independent lifelong readers, does not receive the critical recognition it deserves, the selection committee said.
According to Janice Del Negro, director of the CCB, the new award is considered to be the first such award of its kind.
Florian is the author and illustrator of more than 30 books. He has won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and an ALA Notable Children's Book Award for "Beast Feast."
Florian lives in New York City with his wife and five children, where he "creates poetic tributes to creatures great and small," his Web site says. "Poetry is not black and white," he has been quoted as saying. "It is more like the gray and purple area that connects all the things we live in."
The gryphon, also spelled griffin, is a mythological symbol - part eagle, part lion - that represents the characteristics of loyalty, bravery, strength and penetrating vision.
"Ancient cultures believed the gryphon had an instinct for finding treasure, so you might say we are looking for some transitional treasure here," Del Negro said at the announcement of the award competition last year.
The CCB houses a non-circulating collection of more than 14,000 recent and historically significant trade books for youth - birth through high school - plus review copies of nearly all trade books published in the United States in the current year.
In addition, the collection includes more than 1,000 professional and reference books on the history and criticism of literature for youth, literature-based library and classroom programming and storytelling. Although the collection is non-circulating, it is available for examination by scholars, teachers, librarians, students and other educators.
This month the CCB Web site is featuring its list of the 95 best books of 2003, including "Buddha Boy," by Kathe Koja. Also in the spotlight on the Web site are brief reviews of 15 Latina/Latino folktale books for children.
The Gryphon Award is funded by the CCB Outreach Endowment Fund, which supports outreach activities for the CCB in general and the Gryphon Award in particular. Gifts may be made to the fund by contacting Susan Barrick, 217-244-9577.