Saturday, October 01, 2011

P*TAG = ePoetry for TEENS

Just in time for Teen Read Week (October 16-22), I'm excited to announce the launch of a new poetry project. It's P*TAG, an e-book anthology of new poetry for teens that I've edited with poet Janet Wong. In P*TAG, 31 poets speak to the complicated lives of today's teens, with new, quirky, reflective, and soulful poems about love and longing, war and worry, tattoos, piercings, watching people, being watched, broken lives, luck, burping up kittens, and more.

The list of contributors is a "who's who" of the best poets for young people, including YA poets and verse novelists Naomi Shihab Nye, Margarita Engle, Allan Wolf, Betsy Franco, Paul Janeczko, and Helen Frost, Newbery Honor winner Joyce Sidman, current Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis, and poetry legend Lee Bennett Hopkins, among others.

One interesting twist to this volume is that each of the poems was inspired by a photograph from a collection posted on our P*TAG blog and selected by each poet. These photos then serve as the illustrations for the poems in the book as well. We hope that teachers will encourage teens to "play along," choosing photos from the same blog, writing their own poems about the photos, and then comparing their poems to the ones in the eBook. Here's the photo library blog that inspired each poem http://teenpoetrytagtime.blogspot.com

P*TAG, the first ever digital anthology of new poetry for teens is priced at $2.99 and is available here: http://goo.gl/F0OdV If readers don’t have a Kindle or iPad, they can read the book on a PC using the free Kindle download available here: http://amzn.to/dKazMq

For more info on our poetry ebooks: http://www.PoetryTagTime.com and for our previous book, PoetryTagTime, go here: http://amzn.to/qJ0MjN

Image credit: 

SV and JW

Posting by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2011. All rights reserved.

2 comments:

Janet Wong said...

And for those of us who THOUGHT we knew Sylvia, well...this eBook offers a surprise. Did you have any idea that she is such a talented photographer? Go to our photo blog, http://teenpoetrytagtime.com to see Sylvia's photos!

Sylvia Vardell said...

Aw shucks, thank you, Janet. I have always loved taking pictures (taught by my dad, a photographer) and digital cameras make it faster and easier than ever. Kids can imitate this idea, too-- creating a photo blog and writing poems inspired by those photos. Here's the link to our photo blog, FYI: http://teenpoetrytagtime.blogspot.com/