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By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Boston Globe-Hornbook Awards for Excellence in Children's Literature: "Winners are selected in three categories: Picture Book, Fiction and Poetry, and Nonfiction. Two Honor Books may be named in each category."



The National Book Awards Longlist: Young People's Literature from The New Yorker. Peek: "...a novel in verse about a twelve-year-old soccer nut, an illustrated adventure story that draws on Chinese folklore, a work of nonfiction about a woman who survived the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Nagasaki, a surreal love story involving rumored witches, and a graphic novel about the civil-rights movement co-written by a sitting U.S. congressman."

Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award: "This year’s winner is Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir written by Margarita Engle, published by Atheneum...."

Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Peek: "NCTE honors Matt de la Peña for his courage in standing up for intellectual freedom with the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award, given for de la Peña’s efforts to fight censorship not only through his words but also through his actions."

Willa Award Finalist

Willa Award Winner and Finalists from Women Writing the West. Peek: "Chosen by professional librarians, historians and university affiliated educators, the winning authors and their books will be honored at the 22st Annual WWW Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Oct. to Oct. 16..."

Carter G. Woodson Book Award and Honor Winners: "NCSS established the Carter G. Woodson Book Awards for the most distinguished books appropriate for young readers that depict ethnicity in the United States."

Lammy Award from Lambda Literary. Peek: "Exciting news for Alex Gino and all of us who want this beautiful and important story of a transgender child in 4th grade to get into the hands of everyone who needs it."

NCTE Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children: "...established in 2014 to promote and recognize excellence in the writing of fiction for children. This award recognizes fiction that has the potential to transform children’s lives by inviting compassion, imagination, and wonder."

Parents Choice Book Awards: "Parents' Choice Foundation, established in 1978 as a 501c3, is the nation’s oldest nonprofit guide to quality children’s media and toys."

Finalists Announced for the 2016 Canadian Children's Book Centre Awards"The winners of the English-language awards will be announced at an invitation-only gala event at The Carlu in Toronto on November 17, 2016. The winners of the Prix TD de littérature canadienne pour l’enfance et la jeunesse will be announced at an invitation-only gala event at Le Windsor in Montreal on November 1, 2016. Overall, $135,000 in prize monies will be awarded."

International Latino Award (Chap Book)

2016 International Latino Book Awards: "...now the largest Latino cultural Awards in the USA and with the 257 finalists this year, it has honored the greatness of 2,171 authors and publishers over the past two decades. These books are a great reflection that books by and about Latinos are in high demand. In 2016 Latinos will purchase over $675 million in books in English and Spanish."

Writers' League of Texas Book Award Winners, Finalists and Discovery Prize Winners: "With over 1,200 members statewide and growing, the Writers’ League of Texas is a vibrant community that serves to educate and uplift Texas writers, whatever stage they may be at in their writing careers. In addition, the WLT offers valuable service to communities across the state with free programming in libraries and local schools."

Cynsational Notes

Submissions Guidelines Walter Dean Myers Book Award for YA Lit from We Need Diverse Books. Peek: "A submission must be written by a diverse author and the submission must be a diverse work. If a work has co-authors, at least one of the authors must be diverse..." Deadline: Nov. 1.

Lee & Low New Visions Award: "Manuscripts should address the needs of children and teens of color by providing stories with which they can identify and relate, and which promote a greater understanding of one another. Themes relating to LGBTQ+ topics or disabilities may also be included." Deadline: Oct. 31.

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While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the US presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has also completed an election that may have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan’s parliament) on July 10, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats.

The post Japanese elections: constitutional revision and the anxiety of free speech appeared first on OUPblog.

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While the high drama of the Brexit vote and the US presidential election has grabbed international headlines, Japan has also completed an election that may have far-reaching implications. In the elections for the Upper House of the Diet (Japan’s parliament) on July 10, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partners won 162 seats.

The post Japanese elections: constitutional revision and the anxiety of free speech appeared first on OUPblog.

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What does suicide have to do with the first amendment right to free speech? As it turns out, the question comes up in many contexts: Can a state university student be disciplined for sending a text threatening suicide to another student? Can a young woman be criminally prosecuted for repeatedly texting her boyfriend to insist that he fulfill his intention to commit suicide?

The post Suicide and the First Amendment appeared first on OUPblog.

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Last night twitter user Bill in San diego @BillntwrkBill got very vocal about the Ferguson protests on his account. Which is his right, as laid out by our Bill of Rights. However, it went over the line of what one might call civil commentary with calling the mother of a dead teenager a “whiny bitch” for grieving for her son, and a lot of other offensive rhetoric.

But here’s the interesting part. His bio lists

U. S . Navy Vet. Comic Con Regular Committee member. Married to wonderful woman. My tweets are my own. Go to CCI official website for factual information. Socal

and Comic-Con did indeed come up in several tweets. Bill (identified in this thread on his misdeeds as Bill Purcell) claimed he was not a committee member, but rather a volunteer. A volunteer who offered to give out passes for sexual favors?

And other sexual threats against comics industry members.

@ScottAllie @Comixace @RyanHigginsRyan SD Bill has a history of being abusive and then trying to walk it back (e.g. https://t.co/4A2JzoYHeu)

— Sterling Gates (@sterlinggates) November 25, 2014

Although Bill claimed he was a volunteer for the con, I’m told he was actually a committee member for a while. And he was not a volunteer last year.

While, once again, expressing civilized opinions of current events is perfectly acceptable even if you disagree, using an association with one of the world’s biggest entertainment events—one which has a laudable track record for inclusion and diversity—as a platform for abusive, name calling language and threatening rape is probably not acceptable.

I reached out to Comic-Con and was told “This matter has been brought to our attention and we may be able to comment later in the day.”

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By Robert Cowan

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.

It has always been problematic whether freedom of speech should be extended to those whose speech is considered abhorrent and who might even argue against others’ freedom of speech. Voltaire may offer to lay down his life and Chomsky may assert that “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all”, but the very power of speech which makes its freedom so desirable can also render it an instrument of discrimination, violence, and oppression. It is no coincidence that it is often groups such as the BNP or Qur’an-burning pastors who hold up free speech as a banner under which they can use that freedom to demand the curtailment of others’ freedoms. Even more directly, the dangers of verbal incitement to hatred – be it on racial, sexual, or other grounds – are increasingly recognized in both the statute books and the public consciousness.

WikiLeaks has highlighted the other potential danger of free speech, that, in the famous words of the World War II poster, “careless talk costs lives”. Many have used the rhetoric of being willing to die for the right to free speech, but the issue becomes more problematic when it is soldiers who are dying in Afghanistan because of outrage at revelations of undiplomatic diplomatic cables. Once again, there is no coincidence that it is in times of war and unrest that the issue of free speech becomes particularly fraught. It is then that its negative ramifications can be most keenly felt, but it is also then that it is most under threat from the pressures of power and expediency, then that it most needs defending.

So what does all this have to do with the Roman poet Horace? Horace too was writing in a time of war and political upheaval. As he composed his Satires in the 30s BC, Rome had suffered almost a century of civil unrest exploding into outright civil war at regular intervals, and the final bout between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony was just around the corner. Horace himself had fought on “the wrong side” at the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, in the army of Julius Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, against the ultimate victors, Octavian and Antony. Taken into the circle of Octavian’s ally and unofficial minister of culture, Maecenas, Horace had his status and his finances restored. It was at this point that Horace wrote book one of the Satires. These poems are full of profound human insights and uproarious, often filthy, humour, as can be experienced in John Davie’s lively new translation, but there is one large oddity about them. Horace chose to write satire, the genre of the 2^nd century BC poet Lucilius, famed above all for his fearless freedom of speech, and he chose to write it in the period of probably the greatest military and political upheaval Rome ever underwent, but he “doesn’t mention the war”.

Not only does he not mention it, he goes out of his way not to mention it. Again and again there are opportunities to engage with the important political events in Rome and around her Mediterranean empire, but Horace repeatedly refuses. Satire 1.7 is all about Brutus’ time as governor of the provi

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I ran across an interesting article online from the Wall Street Journal regarding things that are said in social media circles and how it can effect one's employment status. Check it out.

My dear old dad always told me growing up, "Don't put in writing what you wouldn't want the whole world to see." He's right. I've always tried to operate this way in my life. However, Facebook, Twitter, and blogging changed everything.



We are a society of immediacy. We drive through to get our food. We Red Box our movies. We file our income tax online. We don't like to think things over too long or wait for results. Has this resulted in stifling our own internal sensor as to what is and isn't appropriate to say?


(This teacher said she was fired because of a Facebook photo of her on her European vacation holding alcohol. Let's remember...she's of age and it's legal to drink. So why was she fired for that?)

My friend, Pam, is an executive recruiter and she tells me that not only do employers look people up online (website, blog, Twitter, FB) before interviewing them, but schools also look at potential students' sites to see what kind of addition they'll be to campus life.



Is this right? Is Freedom of Speech gone wild? Or is it an infrigement of your rights to have to be accountable for everything you say online.

Just because we CAN say whatever we want, does that mean we SHOULD?

Sure, we've all encountered the school beyotch who made life unbearable at times. We've all had the fat cat of a boss who manages you with a heavy hand. Is it appropriate to Tweet or FB every emotion related to dealing with these people?



It's a slippery slope and one that it seems the courts will start hashing out.

What do you think? What does your "digital" or "virtual social footstep" say about you?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Hugs,
Marley = )

www.marleygibson.com
www.ghosthuntress.com

Ghosts don't hang up their sheets after Halloween!
GHOST HUNTRESS series - The Awakening, The Guidance,
The Reason, The Counseling - available now!

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Photo: Toronto Star

Amy Goodman, a US journalist who hosts "Democracy Now!" and New York Times best-selling author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier” was detained at a Vancouver border crossing last month. According to the CBC, border officials questioned her about what she would be speaking about in Vancouver and Victoria. The Globe and Mail reports that she was scheduled to speak at the public library.

Most disturbing is that border guards asked for her speaking notes. Since she does not use notes to speak, she offered her copy of the book from which should would be reading. The question border guards kept asking was whether she would be speaking about the upcoming Vancouver Olympics. When she returned to her car, guards had gone through their belongings and papers and two of three laptops.

The event as described by Amy Goodman was posted on Truthdig.

Amy concludes:

Our detention and interrogation were not only a violation of freedom of the press but also a violation of the public’s right to know. Because if journalists feel there are things they can’t report on, that they’ll be detained, that they’ll be arrested or interrogated; this is a threat to the free flow of information. And that’s the public’s loss, an Olympic loss for democracy.

While many people have experienced being pulled over at the US/Canada border, the issue is seldom what a person will speak about. This issue should be of great concern to Canadians who value freedom of speech.

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Robert Cohen teaches social studies and history at New York University and chairs the department of Teaching and Learning in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.  His new book, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, is the first biography of Savio, the brilliant leader of the Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who helped carry the students to victory in their struggle against the university.  In the excerpt below we are introduced to Savio.

Few protest leaders have burst upon the American political scene more dramatically than did Mario Savio in fall 1964 when he was a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley student.  The University of California (UC) had become the scene of nonviolent political warfare, with the administration enforcing and students defying a campus ban on political advocacy that closed down the free speech area at UC’s busy southern entrance.  Coming at a time when student civil rights activism was surging, the ban seemed an attack on the civil rights movement and a gross violation of the right to free speech, igniting protests in mid- and late September.  This conflict escalated just before noon on October 1 as police drove a squad car to UC Berkeley’s central thoroughfare, Sproul Plaza, to arrest civil rights organizer Jack Weinberg because he, like many free speech activists, was defying the ban by staffing a political advocacy table on the plaza.  Before the police could arrest, someone shouted, “Sit down!”  Within moments a crowd of students surrounded the car in a nonviolent blockade that would last thirty-two hours.  Shortly after the blockade began, Mario Savio, a leader of the civil rights group University Friends of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), removing his shoes so as not to damage the police car, climbed on top of it and into national headlines, using its roof as a podium to explain the protest and demand freedom of speech.  From those first moments atop that car Savio emerged as the Berkeley rebellion’s key spokesperson, symbolizing all that was daring, militant, and new about the Free Speech Movement (FSM).

…Savio was among the first media starts of America’s New Left – the 1960s student movement “committed to redressing social and political inequalities of power,” challenging cold war nationalism, and renewing “the atrophied institutions of American democracy” by creating “new institutions of popular participation to replace existing bureaucratic structures.” In 1964, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had yet to attract the media coverage it would receive as the key New Left organization of the mid- and late 1960s, Savio was making headlines leading the largest, most disruptive campus rebellion in American history.  He helped to define a new role for American college students, that of a dynamic youth leader igniting mass student protest.

Savio’s fame was closely linked to his oratory.  Back in 1964 the press – with its cold warrior disdain for radicalism – hardly knew how to react to his militant yet popular oratory because it seemed so out of place on U.S. campuses, which had almost never witnessed mass protest…  Time magazine thus looked outside the States for comparisons, evoking Fidel Castro and attributing to Savio “an almost Latin American eloquence…a sense of demagoguery and a flair for martyrdom.”  Yet not even Time’s antiradical editors could miss the fact that Savio had prevailed over a university administration undermined by its “habit of vacillating between concessions and crackdowns.”  The Bay Area press uncomfortably conceded his eloquence, hinting that its appeal was based on emotion rather than reason.  “He harangues in rapid fire staccato,” explained one San Francisco reporter, “shrill at times, emotionally charged always.  He’s a slender 6 foot 1, sloping at the shoulders, clad usually in baggy slacks and a heavy jacket, bushy hair…unkempt, his blue eyes sparkling and intense.”

Friends and foes alike recognized that Savio on the stump “cut an extraordinary figure,” whose words and delivery made a lasting impression.  Berkeley history professor Reginald Zelnik termed Savio “the most original public speaker I would ever hear.” Zelnik saw in him in the reflectiveness of a genuine intellectual, the questioning spirit of the most iconoclast undergraduate, and an intense desire to inspire thought and dialogue.  Berkeley immunology professor Leon Wofsy reflected, “He wasn’t doing it for show.  He wasn’t doing it to provoke.”  When Savio argued on behalf of the FSM, as Wofsy put it, “he was speaking from his heart and from his head.  There was certain quality there.  Not just his rhetoric, but there was a quality of sincerity and thoughtfulness that just lifted him above the others.”

It is Savio’s speeches, not those of professors or campus officials, that have found their way into the histories of the 1960s.  This was in part because during the FSM, as historian Henry May noted, students were the actors, making history through their protests, while faculty and administrators were merely reactors, trying to come to grips with this unprecedented outburst of activism and civil disobedience.  But it more than simply Savio’s insurgent status that made his words memorable.  After all, many Berkeley protesters spoke up, but none of their words have proven so enduring, and none of these speakers could match Savio’s passionate yet logical, accessible, democratic, and at times poetic oratory…

…Savio did not have to be speaking from atop a police car for his words to be remembered.  His most famous speech occurred two months after the police car blockade as he urged students outside Sproul Hall to join the FSM’s culminating sit-in on December 2, 1964.  He demanded that college youth heed their consciences and embrace activism.  “There’s a time, ” Savio exhorted his classmates,

when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.  You can’t even passively take part.  And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.  And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!

This dramatic call to resist unjust authority embodied the youthful idealism and iconoclasm of the insurgent sixties.  Well into our own century it continues to appear in feature films, documentaries, protest songs, and television shows that explore that decade and other times of revolt against oppression.  The speech helped convince some thousand students to occupy Sproul Hall, paving the way for a mass sit-in, which for its time was the greatest act of mass civil disobedience…on an American campus.

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Today I am pleased to be able to bring you a new video from our friends at Meet the Author. Nigel Warburton is the author of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, and here he is explaining what inspired him to write the book, and what the key arguments in free speech are.

He has previously written for OUPblog here, and an excerpt from his book can be found here.  Check out the video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. His latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, examines important questions facing modern society about the value and limits of free speech. In the blog below he talks about Geert Wilders, a right-wing Dutch MP who was recently denied entry into Britain.

There is a constant flow of stories about free speech in the news, so constant that it is almost invisible. Then, every few years, a particularly poignant event occurs and for a few weeks all the media are focused on the topic. Before I began writing Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction the furore about the Danish cartoons had enflamed discussion. Previously it had been the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and then the libel case that David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt in relation to Holocaust denial.

For the last few weeks Geert Wilders’ 16 minute film Fitna and the UK Home Office’s decision not to let him enter the country on the grounds that it ‘would threaten community security and therefore public security’ have been the trigger for self-reflection on where we want to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech – a major theme of my book. It is gratifying to see that this is a live issue today, not a merely academic topic.

Wilders’ film juxtaposes disturbing scenes of the results of terrorism - including from 9/11, the Madrid bombings, an execution of a hostage - with verses from the Koran which allegedly justify and encourage violence. There are clips of extremists urging violence against a range of groups and a small child who has been indoctrinated with hatred. The second half of the film suggests that in the Netherlands the increasing number of Muslims present a threat to democracy and security, represented by the most famous of the Danish cartoons, Muhamed with a turban in the form of a ticking bomb. The film seems to imply that just about any Muslim is a potential threat to democracy and security. It is in many ways crude. But for most people discussing the film, its message has ceased to be the most relevant aspect. This has become a debate about to what degree we should tolerate speech that many people find offensive and the circumstances under which a Government should prevent someone from speaking in the UK.

Wilders, a right wing Dutch MP, had been invited to show and discuss his film in the House of Lords, and the film-showing went on in his absence. But anyone can access Fitna on YouTube. It hasn’t been censored. But preventing the film’s creator from discussing the film and its message with British politicians sent a strange message about how we view free speech in this country. As I write, Wilders is considering suing the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for blatant discrimination and has the backing of the Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen, who declared: ‘Everybody, but especially a Parliamentarian from an European Union member country, has the right to freedom of speech’.

In defence of the decision to deny Wilders entry at least one MP cited John Stuart Mill on the necessary limits to free speech, namely at the point where speech is tantamount to incitement to violence. Mill is subtler than this suggests. He used a famous example contrasting someone declaring ‘Corndealers are starvers of the poor’ on the steps of a corndealer’s house (justifiably censored) with the same view expressed in the editorial of a newspaper (a view that we should tolerate). In other words, context, which in turn affects likely outcomes should be an aspect of any decision to curtail speech.

My view about the British Government’s action is that it has inadvertently and against its wishes illustrated another aspect of Mill’s thesis in On Liberty, namely that speech we find offensive can energise us and stop us falling asleep at the post since it encourages us to reflect on why we disagree with its message. That is a reason to tolerate it and refute it with counter-speech. Without this sort of challenge there is the risk that our beliefs will just be dead dogma. Fortunately the Internet provides an easy way to view Fitna and be stimulated in just this way. The Government’s ban sent many of us scurrying to our trackpads to find out what the fuss was about and as a result are probably a great deal clearer about where we stand on this issue than before.

Nigel Warburton also did a podcast on this subject for The Guardian. Another podcast based on the first chapter of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction can be found here.

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THE F WORD follows radio DJ Joe Pace, who is being forced off the air after racking up $1 million in unpaid FCC indecency fines. For his final show, Joe takes to the streets of New York to cover the protests around the Republican National Convention, discovering that the city’s politics are as diverse as its residents. Combining fictional scenes set among actual protests with documentary footage of real people, director Jed Weintrob weaves a seamless narrative about America’s struggle to find the balance between preserving national security and protecting free speech.

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Global Voices Online offers technical instruction on how to blog anonymously. Please read their disclaimer before trying this for yourself, especially if you live in a country that frowns on free speech. It is not foolproof but offers a layer of protection.




An article on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) is offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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