Students share and compare their literature festival experience

 

      Chris Crutcher was a favorite among many Warsaw students at this year’s Children’s Literature Festival. Crutcher is the author of two collections of short stories and thirteen novels.

  “My favorite part of the festival this year had been Chris Crutcher. He was funny and told everyone stories about his life, and most of them would have been embarrassing if we weren’t having so much fun,” sophomore Mikayla Andrews said.

  Warsaw students attended the annual children’s literature festival and listened to authors and illustrators from across the world talk about their published works. The children’s literature festival, an event held for thousands students grades 3-10 across Missouri, has been an activity offered by Warsaw high school for over the past seventeen consecutive years. This year the event landed on March 20-22 at the UCM campus.

   During the literature festival, students got to listen to authors speak and give their advice while also discovering different parts of the college’s grounds.

    “If you want to become a writer, they went over ways to help. Some authors told stories about how their stories came to life,” Andrews said.

    With ever-changing authors every year, each festival is never the same. Warsaw students compared their previous experiences with this year’s literature festival.

    “My favorite memory was from a couple years ago, when we saw Antony John. He’s from England and I used to live there so listening to his accent kind of made me homesick. The kids loved him. He’s now a US citizen and he lives in St. Louis,” librarian Lori Allen said.

  This year, students were required to read and report on eight of the twelve Gateway books in order to go.

    “Normally you have to write reports on all twelve award nominees but this year it was lowered to eight,” sophomore Zoe Eledge said. “I didn’t consider the requirement hard. It doesn’t take a long time to finish the reports. During finals, I wrote four reports in just two lunch periods.”

    “I considered the reports hard because I procrastinate a bunch and I really don’t like writing,” freshman Jacob Luebbert said.

    “The requirement wasn’t really hard because you’re basically just summarizing the book and telling why you like it,” freshman Kamryn Yach said.

  “I think the festival teaches students that authors are real people,” Allen said, “Sometimes we think of them as being so famous but they’re really just regular ordinary individuals.”