High School and Youth Services Librarians

Download a flyer to post in your school (104kb Microsoft Word Document)

We are pleased to come to you with a ringing endorsement from Booklist associate editor, Donna Seaman, with whom we have recently partnered to enhance the outreach of the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards for Young Writers (formerly the Claudia Ann Seaman Award for Young Poets).

To read and write with skill and pleasure is to be an independent thinker and a critical observer, qualities essential for living an examined and fulfilling life, and for participating fully in a democratic society. To write creatively is to join the great conversation that is literature, an art that more than any other nurtures our capacity for empathy and wonder, perspective and humor. And at no time are the revelations and liberations that literature provides more transforming than during our teenage years, when every feeling and thought is heightened, urgent, and searching. A love for reading and writing must be nurtured, and teachers who encourage a passion for literature in high school students, especially in our cacophonous, commercialized world, are unsung heroes. To provide young writers with a forum for their short stories and poems is to validate the entire literary endeavor, from a writer's discoveries to a reader's delight to an editor's clarifications.

Polyphony H.S. is an outstanding venue for emerging literary talent, and the quality of the work stands in reassuring contrast to dire statistics documenting declining reading and writing skills.

Polyphony H.S.'s first three issues (2005) were knock-outs, and the 2008 edition is even more impressive and inspiriting.
Here are young writers displaying keen social and moral awareness, a remarkable flair for storytelling, receptivity to beauty and sorrow, and a genuine feel for the richness and subtlety of language. Here is hope.
—Donna Seaman

Please consider subscribing to Polyphony H.S. for your library and posting the attached flyer for your young writers.

To Subscribe

For a current or back issue write a check for $10 to Polyphony H.S. and send to the address below:
Polyphony H.S. 
c/o Educational Endeavors
 1535 N. Dayton St.
 Chicago, IL 60642