Today in our poetry news round up we look at this years winner of the CLiPPA Award and the soon to be released new American quarters, one of which will honour a poet.

Children’s Poetry Award Win for Michael Rosen

In 2020, the poet and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen spent two months in a medically induced coma as a result of catching Covid-19. Whilst he is still suffering from the effects of his severe brush with Covid, he hasn’t let that get in the way of his poetry and on Monday this week he was announced as the winner of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Poetry Award or CLiPPA for an anthology of poems he has written about Migration.

The collection is called “On the Move” and is influenced by the poet”s own past growing up as a member of a Polish-Jewish family in London. The collection, which is illustrated by Quentin Blake, was published in October 2020, at a time when Rosen had just begun his journey along the road to recovery.

“On The move” contains poems about those “missing” relatives of the poet who lost their lives in the Holocaust and is a look at his experiences with the subject of migration all over the world and the fact that the human race is in fact always on the move.

He has since authored a book about his experience of being seriously ill and there are also plans to publish a picture book soon on the subject of learning to walk again, something Rosen has had to learn.

This years shortlist for the CLiPPA was a strong one which highlighted some incredibly outstanding poetry however the decision to select “On the Move” as the winner was a unanimous one from the panel of judges. Other contenders included Matt Goodfellow, Nikita Gill and Manjeet Mann.

Rosen is a previous winner of the CLiPPA having been awarded it in 2016 for “A Great Big Cuddle”. He shared the award with joint winner Sarah Crossan for her collection “One”.

New Quarter Design Features Maya Angelou

The U.S Mint has recently unveiled the designs for the new quarters that they will be releasing in 2022. The coins will be in honour of the “trailblazing American women.” There will be five quarters released in 2022 of a total of 20 – all of which will be released by 2025.

The coins will honour a wide range of different women; women who have had a significant impact on the history of America in the fields of civil rights, government, suffrage, science, the arts, space, abolition, and humanities.

One of the first designs that will be released is in honour of the poet Maya Angelou, who was also an activist. The other four are inspired by Wilma Mankiller an activist and principle Cherokee Nation Chief, Dr Sally Ride an astronaut, Nina Otero-Warren who was a suffragette and Wilma May Wong who was as film star.

Each design is unique to the U.S Mint and will feature an image of the women it honours together with their name and the moto “E pluribus unum.”