The 2014 Cybils Shortlist Finalists are Announced! And a thank you.

This year I was very excited (and honored!) to be a first round panelist for the 2014 Cybils in the YA Speculative Fiction category. There were a little over 200 books nominated and we were tasked with getting that list down to 7 worthy candidates. As you can imagine, there is a lot of great discussion that happens here, which is why I love being a part of the Cybils.

Even though I read prolifically, I always find a variety of new authors and titles via the Cybils. If you haven’t already, do look through the lists of nominations in all the categories because there are a lot of good books there. This year for the first year ever I was the panelist with the most number of pages read, in part because I got really lucky and had read a bunch of the nominated titled previously in the year. I got lucky on that one!

Now, the shortlist will move to another group of judges who will pick 1 title out of these 7 to give the honor to, which I think will be a very challenging task.

To see the full list of YA Speculative Fiction nominees, visit the Cybils page here

I want to give a special shout out to Sheila Ruth who organizes the Cybils and led our panel on YA speculative fiction. She was tasked with the responsibility of keeping it all organized, contacting publishers, and reminding us all to keep our books read database updated. She also kept reminding us to read with quality, teen appeal and diversity in mind, which I think really helped us come up with such a stellar list. Thank you so much to Sheila and all the other first round panelist for the gift of great discussion and the value of your wisdom and insight. You guys brought up things in the books I hadn’t necessarily thought of and helped me think critically about a lot of new and interesting issues.

Filed under: Cybils