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Recognizing dedication and creativity with the Young Authors Award

On Thursday, February 27th, 826LA had a lot to celebrate. We unveiled the Young Authors Wall, a public display honoring the literary accomplishments of our Young Author award winners. We also cheered on the writers of our latest student chapbook, The Moon Has Eyes, The Moon Sees the Sky. Over sixty students contributed creative narratives, poems, and other pieces of writing to the chapbook, which they worked on for six weeks prior to publication. Students, families, 826LA staff, and volunteers gathered to hear stories, and express gratitude for the collaboration of hundreds of volunteers and Echo Park’s incredible writing community.

826LA promotes and supports creative writing for students through tutoring, workshops, field trips, and in-school projects. The tutoring programs focus on homework support, while also engaging students in creative writing and editing. While all our authors contributed developed and beautiful pieces, four students were selected to be acknowledged through the Young Authors award.

Daniel, Ryuichiro, Emily, and Luis all received the Young Authors award in recognition of their dedication, creativity, exploration, and excellence in creative writing. All four young authors have contributed multiple pieces to our chapbooks, have immersed themselves in the thorough editing process, and have served as great examples by encouraging their peers to write. With the volunteer efforts of our design interns and photographer Stephen Stocker (thanks, Stephen!), these students were honored with a professional photo shoot and wall display showcasing their smiling faces, biographies, and a sample of their writing. At the outer space-themed chapbook release party, students were acknowledged for their creative writing achievements, read their pieces aloud and received a special gift jar of space goo from the 826LA Time Travel Mart.

Check out some of our favorite lines from their pieces below:

“The next morning my monster made noises that I never heard before. One of the noises sounded like a new student from music class playing the tuba and like a maniac singing in an opera chorus and breaking the audience’s ear drums. ”

-Daniel, The Mysterious Creature Mystery

“He planted his humongous diamond…When he was planting he was crying so hard that the field got bigger. The bigger the field grew the harder he cried…The grumpy man was so happy. November. It was his favorite season. He found a bunch of gold. He went to the regular world. He missed the shiny world.”

-Ryuichiro, Diamond For Money

“After I started walking around. The ground was violet and there was a lot of bushes. There was fruits on the bush like blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries. The problem was they were different colors. The blueberries were red, the blackberries were pink, the strawberries were green and the raspberries were yellow.”

– Emily, Yoshi Planet

“Then the countdown clock started 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 liftoff. Then the coffee in Will’s hand floated in midair, then Will floated and Beth and then everyone floated. We made it to the planet and it was huge, as big as 20 skyscrapers, and the plants were nice.”

– Luis, My Pizza Planet

Please join us in congratulating our Young Authors award winners! To continue reading these and other exciting literary adventures from our students, pick up a chapbook at either of the Time Travel Marts. You will be supporting academic enhancement programs for young people, and will be reading the ideas of our future!

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