Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Letters About Literature

11/7/2016

2 Comments

 
How has a certain book, poem, or speech changed how you view yourself or the world? My answer doesn’t come readily. Yet tens of thousands of children and youth each year offer their responses in the form of a letter to the author, living or dead. Many letters are perceptive and moving.

Letters about Literature is a reading and writing contest sponsored by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book. Students in fourth grade through high school submit letters about “books that burrow down deep into your consciousness and stay there, festering,” in the words of one of last year’s honor award winners. Some letters describe how books helped students through personal experiences of loss, bullying, difference, stereotypes, and incarceration. This is not your traditional book report.

Who would I write to? I might thank Laura Ingalls Wilder or any of countless others for making me curious about how perspective shifts with culture, time, and place. I might thank A. A. Milne for helping make me a Universalist with his poem “King John’s Christmas,” which models wishing people happiness without regard to merit.

Student entries are judged at state and national levels. Entries for grades 9-12 must be postmarked by Dec. 2 and grades 4-6 and 7-8 by Jan. 9. Click here for guidelines and entry coupon.
2 Comments
professional thesis writers link
5/29/2019 09:51:43 pm

I am happy to know that Congress’s Center for the Book has been sponsoring different competitions that encourage people to keep on writing. Letters about Literature is a good project because it is the way to let people be involved with the idea of writing. When I was still a student, I kept joining different writing competitions because I see it as a way for self-improvement!

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Sarah link
5/31/2019 05:43:17 am

It is especially valuable as students learn the basic ethics and conventions of writing, attribution, plagiarism, and attaching one's name only to one's personal work.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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