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Public Event

"It's All Write!" Teen Short Story Contest Final Celebration!

Sunday June 12, 2016: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room
Grade 6 - Adult

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Writing & Publishing

"Write On!" Story Contest Awards Celebration!

Sunday April 17, 2016: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room
Grade 3 - Adult

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Public Event

"Write On!" 3rd-5th Grade Short Story Contest Begins!

Monday February 9, 2015: 12:00am to 11:55pm

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Public Event

"It's All Write!" Teen Short Story Contest Final Celebration!

Sunday June 7, 2015: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Pittsfield Branch: Program Room
Adults And Teens Grade 6 And Up.

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Writing & Publishing

"Write On!" Story Contest Awards Celebration!

Sunday April 19, 2015: 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room
Youth (Grade 3 And Up) Teens And Adults.

"Write On!" Short Story Contest for Grades 3-5

The 2023 Write On contest is now closed for entries.

The annual "Write On!" Short Story Contest for Grades 3-5 accepts story entries each winter (dates are included in each year's guidelines). All writers, their friends, and families are invited to a Final Celebration, featuring a published children's author, once the contest ends. The top three writers in each grade will receive an award and each writer will receive a certificate of participation. Last year the contest received over 100 submissions from Ann Arbor and beyond!

HOW TO ENTER THE CONTEST
1. Check out the CONTEST GUIDELINES!
2. Write your story! (Need some help? Here are some WRITING RESOURCES.)
3. Email your story to youngwrite@aadl.org.
4. Attend the Story Celebration once the contest is done to find out the contest winners and hear our featured guest speaker- a published children's author!
Questions about the contest may be directed to youngwrite@aadl.org or call the library at 734-327-4200.

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Blog Post

Letters About Literature Contest

by Bertha

Has one book — or maybe one author — inspired you to change your view of yourself or your world? If so, we encourage you to enter this year’s Letters About Literature writing competition. All you have to do is write a personal letter to an author, explaining how his or her work affected you. If it was me, I might write to Judith Ortiz Cofer, Gary D. Schmidt, or Brian Selznick.
Letters About Literature is a national reading promotion program of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, presented in partnership with Target and affiliate state centers for the book.
Click here to read letters from past competitions.
Grades 4 - 12. The deadline for submitting a letter is January 6th, 2012.

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Blog Post

2010 It's All Write! Short Story Writing Contest

by Bertha

Got an idea for a short story? The timing is perfect if you do, either have an idea you've been thinking about, or put an ending to a story that has a brilliant beginning but you just didn't know how to finish. The 2010 It's All Write short story writing contest for area teens has begun. The last day to turn in stories is Friday, March 19. Click here for complete guidelines.

1st Place ($250), 2nd Place ($150), and 3rd Place ($100) prizes will be awarded in the following categories : Grades 6-8, Grades 9-10, and Grades 11-12.

Need inspiration? You might want to check out last year's winning stories or any of the short story collections edited by Donald R. Gallo.

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Blog Post

It's good to be short

by CasualTim

While perusing the blog of a Harper Collins marketing coordinator (read about it on muffy’s post), I saw that she invited readers to create six-word memoirs, inspired by the book It All Changed In An Instant : More Six-Word Memoirs By Writers Famous & Obscure. This got me thinking about how the new kind of mass communication (that is, personal broadcasting) is all about brevity. 140 characters in Twitter and texting, four-word film reviews, six-word memoirs, or 55 fiction, the personal tale is trending to shortness.

The cynic in me might attribute this to what seems to be an increasingly shorter attention span in the human animal, but the English major in me knows there’s more to the (short) story: rigid structure and restraint often help us process and speak about things in a more poignant way. Perhaps one of the most moving examples of this phenomenon is W.S. Merwin’s “Elegy,” which can be found in The Carrier of Ladders or The Second Four Books of Poems. Another amazing example of hard-hitting, extremely short poetry is The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons.

Other short things I can suggest? The song “Minimum Wage” on the classic They Might Be Giants album Flood is 46 seconds long and contains two (maybe three) words. Kristin Chenoweth is reportedly 4’11,” and has done quite a bit of fun work in music, television, theater and film. Find her song “Taylor the Latte Boy” on your online vendor of choice or check out Pushing Daisies. The Ann Arbor District Library conducts its own short story contest, and the winning stories are a part of the circulating collection. I haven’t gotten around to watching the Pixar Short Films Collection (v.1), but if the shorts you always get to see at the theater before one of their features are evidence of anything, it’s the beauty of simplicity and diminutiveness.

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Blog Post

The 4th Annual LEGO Contest Winners are In!

by erin

Another summer, another LEGO contest and good times were had by all! This year we had 155 entries and over 300 people attended the Awards Ceremony! The top three winners in each of the five age categories (Preschool, K-2, 3-5, 6-8 & 9-12) received gift certificates to Toys R Us and medals. Special thanks to our hardworking judges: Eli Neiburger, AADL Associate Director of IT and Product Development, Eric Klooster, AADL IT Application Developer and finally Langel Bookbinder, Founder and Proprietor of battleofthebits.org. The judges needed every second of their three hours of deliberation to make the hard decisions this year!

Congratulations to all of our winners! And see you next year!

Click read more to see all of this year's winners.

Preschool:

1st Place - Hudhaifah Rehman
Runner-Up - Kenneth Jiang
Honorable Mention - Natalie Leffler
Best Motorized - Tommy Simon
Best Architectural/Engineering - Lucy Cassell-Kelley
Coolest Robot - Kairi Kowalski
Best Vehicle - Kevin Song
Most Creative - Andrew VanderMolen
Most Sophisticated - Hudhaifah Rehman
AADL LEGO® Master Builder - Eliot Schoolmaster

Grades K-2:

1st Place - Vishrut Khandelwal
Runner-Up - Anisha Fujii
Honorable Mention - Forrest Hadley
Best Motorized - Xander Doom
Best Architectural/Engineering - Evan & Ella Markley
Coolest Robot - Ben Birdsall & Scott Knudsen (tie)
Best Vehicle - Walden Jones-Perpich
Most Creative - Rachel Gowell
Most Sophisticated - Alex Szumko
AADL LEGO® Master Builder - Colin Finnegan

Grades 3-5:

1st Place - Peyton Miller
Runner-Up - Calvin Mayman
Honorable Mention - Xavier Iniguez
Best Motorized - Benjamin Eric Cohen
Best Architectural/Engineering - Spencer Steiff
Coolest Robot - Gavin Nossal
Best Vehicle - Joe Schaldenbrand
Most Creative - Ben Gowell
Most Sophisticated - Peter Jacobs & Jayson Song (tie)
AADL LEGO® Master Builder - Eric Xu

Grades 6-8:

1st Place - Caleb Jones
Runner-Up - Ryan George
Honorable Mention - Matthew Remillard
Best Motorized - Marshal Knott
Best Architectural/Engineering - Andreas Prawdzik
Coolest Robot - Christopher Williams
Best Vehicle - Kevin McGregor
Most Creative - Nicole Xu & John Crane, Aaron Crane, and Avi Covrigaru (tie)
Most Sophisticated - Noah Luntzlara
AADL LEGO® Master Builder - Josh Goodman and Andrew Lemerand

Grades 9-12

1st Place - Peter Zieske
Runner-Up - Elizabeth Deatrick
Honorable Mention - John Behrendt
Best Architectural/Engineering - William Anderson
Best Vehicle - Nick Lemerand