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Ages 11-18

2024 "It's All Write!" Teen Writing Contest

banner showing the contest title and dates for the 2024 It's All Write teen writing contest

The Ann Arbor District Library is excited to host its 32nd annual “It’s All Write!” Teen Writing Contest in Winter 2024! Young Adult authors take part as judges each year, who then read and select the winning stories. Short stories, flash fiction and poems are judged in three different categories: Grades 6-8, Grades 9 & 10, and Grades 11 & 12. The top three writers in each age group receive fabulous prizes. This is an ever-growing, state-wide contest.

Kids in grades 3-5 can also enter AADL's Write On! short story writing contest, which will take place in January and February of 2024.

How to Enter the Contest:

The 2024 It's All Write Teen Writing Contest will accept submissions January 8-March 3, 2023. Please note that the 2024 contest is open to Michigan residents only.

The submission form links will become available on this site when the contest opens.

Click here for more information about the 2024 contest!

2023 "It's All Write!" Teen Writing Contest

blue, orange and green banner showing the words IT'S ALL WRITE with the contest dates

The Ann Arbor District Library is excited to host its 31st annual “It’s All Write!” Teen Writing Contest in Winter 2023! Young Adult authors take part as judges each year, who then read and select the winning stories. Short stories, flash fiction and poems are judged in three different categories: Grades 6-8, Grades 9 & 10, and Grades 11 & 12. The top three writers in each age group receive fabulous prizes. This is an ever-growing, state-wide contest.

Kids in grades 3-5 can also enter AADL's Write On! short story writing contest, which will take place in January and February of 2023.

How to Enter the Contest:

The 2023 It's All Write Teen Writing Contest will accept submissions January 9-March 5, 2023. Please note that the 2023 contest is open to Michigan residents only.

The submission form links will become available on this site when the contest opens.

Click here for more information about the 2023 contest!

2022 "It's All Write!" Teen Writing Contest

The 2022 It's All Write! Teen Writing Contest is now closed for submissions. Winners were announced at the online awards ceremony on May 21, viewable on aadl.org and YouTube.

The Ann Arbor District Library is excited to host its 30th annual “It’s All Write!” Teen Writing Contest in Winter 2022! Young Adult authors take part as judges each year, who then read and select the winning stories. Stories are judged in three different categories: Grades 6-8, Grades 9 & 10, and Grades 11 & 12. The top three writers in each age group receive fabulous prizes. This is an ever-growing, state-wide contest.

Kids in grades 3-5 can also enter AADL's Write On! short story writing contest, which will accept entries January 10 - February 7, 2022.

2021 "It's All Write!" Teen Writing Contest

The 2021 It's All Write! Teen Writing Contest is now closed for submissions. Join us for the virtual Awards Ceremony on Sunday, May 23 at 1pm on AADL.TV.

The Ann Arbor District Library is excited to host its 29th annual “It’s All Write!” Teen Writing Contest in Winter 2021! Young Adult authors take part as judges each year, who then read and select the winning stories. Stories are judged in three different categories: Grades 6-8, Grades 9 & 10, and Grades 11 & 12. The top three writers in each age group receive fabulous prizes. This is an ever-growing, state-wide contest.

Kids in grades 3-5 can also enter AADL's Write On! short story writing contest, which will take place in January and February of 2021.

How to Enter the Contest:

The 2021 teen writing contest is now closed.

Congratulations to our 2021 winners!  You can see the winners and read the winning stories, along with all the submitted stories whose author gave us permission to publish their work, below.

2021 Winners in Flash Fiction:

6th-8th Grade Winners:

1st Mary Russell "The Gift"
2nd Grace Belanger "Letting go"
3rd Jessica Primus "My Little Red Jacket"

9th-10th Grade Winners:

1st Anonymous "Sugar High"
2nd Jessica Jia "Growing Up"
3rd Angie Liu "Little Red Riding Hood"

11th-12th Grade Winners:

1st Eilie Weatherbee "Gone"
2nd Chloe Long "Grief's Journey"
3rd Helen Schmitter "In our Kitchen"

2021 Winners in Short Story:

6th-8th Grade Winners:

1st Grace Liu "Yellow"
2nd Jennifer Tang "the ocean swallows"
3rd Ella Gonzalez "FlowerGirl"

9th-10th Grade Winners:

1st Olivia Palmbos "Mother"
2nd Kriya Jaiganesh "Scales and Arpeggios"
3rd Ioana Dumitrascu "I Guess I'm Not the Happiest"

11th-12th Grade Winners:

1st Hye-won Yoo "[238] Trial Run 52"
2nd Anonymous "Birds of America"
3rd Audrey George "The Gray Fox"

2021 Winners in Poetry:

6th-8th Grade Winners:

1st Helen Kolias "Never Again"
2nd Rebecca van Lent "Supernova"
3rd Anonymous "Blue"

9th-10th Grade Winners:

1st Sean McMillen "To Stand"
2nd Gillian Perry "PUPPET SHOW, DECEMBER"
3rd Zain Rahim "Untitled"

11th-12th Grade Winners:

1st Anonymous "My Honest Poem"
2nd Madeline Gupta "My People: In Reverse"
3rd Chloe Long "A Hypocrite's Sword"

Congratulations to our 2021 Finalists in each category! Click the links below to see the lists of this year's finalists:

6th-8th Grade Finalists

9th-10th Grade Finalists

11th-12th Grade Finalists

You can read all Finalist submissions here.

You can read all the submissions to the 2021 It's All Write contest here.

Adopt a Font

 

proof sheet

Recently the AADL acquired 125+ cases of handset lead type from the former Jackson Typesetting Company.  In preparation of making this amazing resource available for use in printing at the weekly Letterpress Lab program, we will be pulling proof sheets of each drawer of type. 

A proof sheet is a letterpress print which incorporates all the letters from a particular font of type.  Project goals are to get an accurate character sort count, and a representation of the physical condition of the type.  The proof sheets will also enable the creation of an electronic database containing an accurate character count of all fonts.

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Blog Post

Teens Using Drugs: Education Series

by Beth Manuel

The Dawn Farms Education Series, "Teens Using Drugs: What To Know and What To Do" will resume in January, 2018. This is a free, two-part series that will be presented from 7:30-9:00 pm Tuesday, January 2nd (part one, "What to Know"), and Tuesday, January 9th, (part two, "What to Do"). The programs will be held in the "Exhibition Room" on the first floor of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital Education Center at 5305 Elliott Drive, Ypsilanti. The sessions are presented by the Dawn Farm Youth & Family Services team. This program is targeted primarily to parents/caretakers of teens & young adults but is inclusive of other family members, teens, professionals, students, people who sponsor or support teens, and others interested. Please contact 734-485-8725 or info@dawnfarm.org or see the link to Dawn Farm for further information.

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Blog Post

Brainfuse: Live Tutoring & Homework Help

by Beth Manuel

Homework giving you a headache? You may want to log on to Brainfuse. Their Live Homework Help is available from 2:00 PM-11:00 PM everyday (except Federal Holidays) & the interactive Study Suite is accessible anytime with your aadl account log in information. For more information about all the amazing facets of Brainfuse read these FAQs. Using Brainfuse can make learning fun for parents & kids! College students and adult learners can benefit from it, too! Give it a try!

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Blog Post

An unusual debut

by Lucy S

In a literary world full of “5 under 35 lists” and authors publishing first novels in their 20s, Leah Weiss is something of an anomaly. Her debut novel, If The Creek Don’t Rise was written after her retirement from a 24 year career as the executive assistant to the headmaster at Virginia Episcopal School. In it she introduces us to the harsh and difficult life in a small town in Appalachia in the 1970s. This can be a dangerous place, a world of violence and cruelty, especially for women. Weiss presents this community through a profuse range of voices, voices with their own dialect, particular to these mountain ranges.

The chapters in Weiss’ book, each narrated by a different individual, read like a collection of connected stories, offering a unique and varied glimpse of Baines Creek, a remote haven in an unspecified state. As a newcomer to Baines Creek, teacher Kate Shaw, one of Weiss’ strongest characters, describes it as “barely a crossroad, a dot on a map. It’s remote, embraced by natural beauty, and riddled with hardships,” with “poverty the likes of which I’ve never imagined except in the books of Dickens and Brontë sisters.”

The cast of players in this secluded town represents all facets of personality and morality, and an internal view of even the most vile characters unveils some vulnerability. We are able to see why Prudence Perkins, the reverend’s spiteful, spinster sister, is so mean spirited, and to learn from where intense cruelty is born in the heart of an abusive bully, Roy Tupkin.

If there is a main character in If The Creek Don’t Rise, she is Sadie Blue, the wife of Roy. Her voice provides bookends, she starts the first and last chapters with the same sentence, within which she demonstrates one woman’s path to a better place in a town that so often resists change. Ultimately this is Sadie Blue’s story, provided to us by a chorus of voices from those who know her, but we get to experience so many other memorable folks from Baines Creek along the way.

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Blog Post

Teens Using Drugs: Education Series

by Beth Manuel

The Dawn Farms Education Series, "Teens Using Drugs: What To Know and What To Do" meets again. This is a free, two-part series that will be presented from 7:30-9:00 pm Tuesday, November 7th (part one, "What to Know"), and Tuesday, November 14th, (part two, "What to Do"). The programs will be held in the "Exhibition Room" on the first floor of St. Joseph Mercy Hospital Education Center at 5305 Elliott Drive, Ypsilanti. The sessions are presented by the Dawn Farm Youth & Family Services team. This program is targeted primarily to parents/caretakers of teens & young adults but is inclusive of other family members, teens, professionals, students, people who sponsor or support teens, and others interested. Please contact 734-485-8725 or info@dawnfarm.org or see the link to Dawn Farm for further information.

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Blog Post

Grasping for that Grassy Green Cover...

by LibraryLiz

But then, lo and behold, there was ANOTHER time at the library...with that book you saw on a shelf, with a GREEN cover, that drew you in - but, of course, you had to pass it by in that moment for some unbeknownst reason. Now, if you should find yourself green with envy for that grassy-colored cover, I may have the book for you! I've recently created a list of books that have, or have had, green covers - whether or not their most recent editions have that gorgeous emerald hue, they did at some point! Plus, this list is welcome to all kinds of green covered books...

Whether it be a marshy green of the novel The Marsh King's Daughter, a gawky bright green like The Awkward Age, or perhaps the olive green of Behind the Mask, all green covers are welcome on this compilation list. But this list isn't just for the adults! There's also a wide age range available for the younger reader greedy for the green...

Whether it's from the teen section like Fablehaven, maybe Gary Paulsen's The River, or even Insurgent from Veronica Roth's best-selling Divergent series, this list has a generous collection of green covered pages that you might have left on the shelf. Even the youth may have glazed over a glorious green book resting on it's display, such as The Secret Garden or Evermore Dragon. This list also gives a gateway to the many genres that glisten with glittering green covers at the library...

Maybe you were gleefully grasping through science fiction and found The Best of Ian McDonald or David Hutchinson's Acadie? Could you have gone gallivanting through the Express Shelf and seen My Absolute Darling or found The Essex Serpent? What about the non-fiction readers, who may have glanced through the graceful stacks, gazing at gripping covers glorifying goodly grub for the growing kids or great grammatical rhymes?

This list has ALL THE THINGS (or would like to have) and is growing each day! Please feel free to take a gander, and graciously grumble or gab about other green-covered books you think others may be searching for, so the list gets gargantuan. Just think: someone out there could be looking for a leafy-green book jacket that you've read before - maybe you've got the answer they've been grieving for as they search the grand volumes we have here at AADL. Or perhaps you yourself have getting grumpy in the search, and the book is in this list already!!! Only one way to find out...