NOBLE Book Awards 2018: Poetry

First place

Latham, Irene
Can I touch your hair? : poems of race, mistakes, and friendship
Irene Latham, who is white, and Charles Waters, who is black, present paired poems about topics including family dinners, sports, recess, and much more. This relatable collection explores different experiences of race in America.

Runners-up

Reynolds, Jason
For every one
"”Originally performed at the Kennedy Center for the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and later as a tribute to Walter Dean Myers, this stirring and inspirational poem is New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds’s rallying cry to the dreamers of the world. Jump Anyway is for kids who dream. Kids who dream of being better than they are. Kids who dream of doing more than they almost dare to dream. Kids who are like Jason, a self-professed dreamer. In it, Jason does not claim to know how to make dreams come true; he has, in fact, been fighting on the front line of his own battle to make his own dreams a reality. He expected to make it when he was sixteen. He inched that number up to eighteen, then twenty-five years old..Now, some of those expectations have been realized. But others, the most important ones, lay ahead, and a lot of them involve kids, how to inspire them. All the kids who are scared to dream, or don’t know how to dream, or don’t dare to dream because they’ve NEVER seen a dream come true. Jason wants kids to know that dreams take time. They involve countless struggles. But no matter how many times a dreamer gets beat down, the drive and the passion and the hope never fully extinguish–because just having the dream is the start you need, or you won’t get anywhere anyway, and that is when you have to take a leap of faith and…jump anyway” ; “An inspirational letter written to the dreamers of the world”"
Smith, Tracy K.
Wade in the water : poems
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, using her signature voice–inquisitive, lyrical and wry–mulls over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence, boldly tying America’s modern moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting.

Other nominees

Sing a song of seasons : a nature poem for each day of the year
Summary:Contains 366 nature poems–one for every day of the year. Filled with familliar favorites and new discoveries by a vast array of poets, including Langston Hughes, Lilian Moore, Emily Dickinson, Jack Prelutsky, William Shakespeare, N.M. Bodecker, Kanoko Okamoto, and many more.


Mateer, Trista
Honeybee : poems
Summary:Following the course of a little more than a year, the poems chronicle the on-again off-again process of letting go.


Sotelo, Analicia
Virgin : poems
Summary:"Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman"–Provided by publisher.


Wright, Richard
Seeing into tomorrow : haiku by Richard Wright
Summary:From watching a sunset to finding a beetle, Richard Wright’s haiku puts everyday moments into focus. Paired with the photo-collage artwork of Nina Crews, Seeing into Tomorrow celebrates the lives of contemporary African American boys.