Hip Hop Speaks to Children Wins NAACP Image Award in Poetry
Hip Hop Speaks to Children Wins NAACP Image Award in Poetry NAPERVILLE, IL — The 40th NAACP Image Awards were held in Los Angeles, hosted by Academy Award-winner Halle Berry and acclaimed screenwriter/actor Tyler Perry. This year, over 1,200 entries were received, and the final selections were voted on by NAACP members. There were eight literary awards given out, among them, Nikki Giovanni’s New York Times bestselling Hip Hop Speaks to Children won for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. Hip Hop Speaks to Children, since its release in October, has become a major hit with kids, parents, teachers, librarians, poetry-lovers, and the hip hop community. Called “the most essential poetry purchase to make this year” by Diane Chen, librarian and chair of AASL's Legislation Committee, Hip Hop Speaks to Children is a celebration of poetry with a beat, created by National Book Award nominee, Spoken Word Grammy nominee, and New York Times bestselling author Nikki Giovanni. Hip Hop Speaks to Children presents powerful messages, from James Weldon Johnson to Langston Hughes to Gwendolyn Brooks to Queen Latifah, and shows how rhythm and rhyme form a common thread between them. Readers can immerse themselves in fifty-one selections from forty-two poets and performers and thirty performances on the audio CD, many recorded specially for this collection. Founded on February 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its half-million adult and youth members throughout the
