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player ready...Sometimes it takes a cell phone to find out your fairy godfather has tapped you on the shoulder and dropped $1,000 in your lap. Thing is, you have to remember to check for messages.
Which Esme Raji Codell decidedly did not do. Not for hours, at least.
Codell, otherwise known as Madame Esme, founder of Chicago’s first and so far only children’s literary salon (Q wrote about it on Feb. 27), author of many children’s books and the wizard behind the Web site that children’s book lovers love to browse, www.planetesme.com, might be forgiven for her lapse in message checking.
Heck, how was she to know that she would be among the premier batch of 34 winners in the 2005 James Patterson PageTurner Awards, announced just before Thanksgiving? (Augustus H. Burley Elementary School in the Lake View neighborhood was the only other local winner, snaring $5,000 for spurring kids to read.)
The awards recognize schools, bookstores, communities and individuals who “go to extraordinary lengths to spread the joy of books and reading across the country.”
Codell, who was motoring through the countryside of Pennsylvania when at last she noticed that someone had left her a message, let out a yelp when she heard the news.
“It was like having my fairy godfather leave a message,” she said from her cozy West Rogers Park literary salon.
Although more than 1,500 nominations poured in for the first-time awards, Patterson, the best-selling author who put up the $100,000 prize money, let on that Codell jumped off the page because “I like people who make noise about books, and she’s been making noise for quite a while.”
The noise she is now making is a joyful one indeed.