On September 8th, the South Carolina State Library's Center for the Book and the State Library proudly awarded the recipients of the 2010 South Carolina Center for the Book Awards for Writing, Teaching and Literary Arts Advocacy as well as the first annual State Library Partnership & Collaboration Award. This year's Center for the Book award winners were noted South Carolina author Batt Humphreys, for Writing (Dead Weight); Dr. Tom Mack of Aiken, for Teaching; and the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at USC, for Literary Arts Advocacy. The Library was also pleased to announce the first State Library Partnership and Collaboration Award winner Helen Fellers, Coordinator of the USC School of Library and Information Science's South Carolina Center for Children's Books and Literacy.
Over 50 people attended the special ceremony and reception for the honored recipients. Everyone enjoyed the chance to mingle and partake in wonderful refreshments provided by the South Carolina State Library Foundation.
The South Carolina Center for the Book Awards were formerly a single award known as the Palmetto Book Award. In 2008, the Palmetto Book Award expanded to honor excellence in Writing, Teaching and Literary Arts Advocacy. Nominees must be published writers, current teachers, or active promoters of the literary arts in South Carolina, as described in a one page nomination letter. Winners are selected from nominations submitted to the South Carolina Center for the Book by the general public. Any individual or organization in South Carolina that works to promote the literary arts and to foster a creative atmosphere in the state is eligible for nomination for the Literary Arts Advocacy award. Any current teacher of the literary or language arts at any level or type of school in South Carolina is eligible for nomination for the Teaching award. Any South Carolina writer of any genre whose work was published in the previous calendar year is eligible for nomination for the Writing Award. Last year's winners of the South Carolina Center for the Book Awards were The Free Times for Literary Arts Advocacy; Libby Collins of Dent Middle School in Columbia for Teaching; Leonard Todd (Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter, Dave) for Writing.
The South Carolina Center for the Book is the South Carolina affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book and is a cooperative project of the South Carolina State Library, the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science, and The Humanities CouncilSC.
For more information about the South Carolina Center for the Book, please visit www.sccenterforthebook.org. For additional event photos, visit the State Library's Flickr set here: http://bit.ly/cLjOox.
