Vote for "The Jerry" today

The M. Jerry Weiss Book Award was established in 1994 by the New Jersey Reading Association to honor Dr. M. Jerry Weiss, distinguished service professor at New Jersey City University and nationally known advocate of children’s literature. 

Continuing this legacy, the New Jersey Literacy Association and the West Jersey Reading Council now collaborate to present this award, affectionately known as “The Jerry."

Three awards are given in the following Pre-K through Grade 6 categories: picture book, chapter book/novel, and graphic novel.

The Evolving Science of Reading: Building a K-12 Continuum from Foundations to Fluent Thinking

Session Description: For far too long, the "Science of Reading" has been framed as an early literacy initiative focused primarily on phonics and decoding. In this session, Dr. Anthony Fitzpatrick dismantles the false binary between "learning to read" and "reading to learn," replacing it with a master framework for a coherent, developmental K-12 continuum.

Drawing from his new book, Dr. Fitzpatrick will guide educators and leaders through the "POSSUM" acronym—addressing the often-missing links of Semantics, Syntax, and Morphology. We will explore how to repair the "Third Grade Cliff" by ensuring foundational gains transition seamlessly into linguistic complexity and rhetorical reasoning. Attendees will leave with a clear vision of how to move beyond "Mastery" as a ceiling, instead building a literacy architecture that cultivates independent thought, empathy, and agency across all grade levels.