By Khalida Sarwari
There was no shortage of imagination at this year’s Rising Young Authors awards ceremony. The 10th annual event recently celebrated the imaginations of 11 talented student authors from the Campbell Union School District’s elementary and middle schools.
The students gathered at the Barnes and Noble in the Pruneyard Shopping Center on Nov. 1 to give speeches about their books, followed by a signing of copies of their published works. The guest speaker that evening was Ryan Eshoff, one of the first-year winners of the contest in 2002 who is now attending Stanford’s graduate program in journalism.
The 11 winners–each the first-place winner for their school–were selected from a pool of hundreds of participants in grades 3-7 who entered their short stories and poems in the district’s annual writing contest.
For 10-year-old Maritza Campos, winning the contest was a goal of hers since seeing a friend win last year. The fifth-grader at Blackford wrote My Solar System Trip, a sci-fi tale about her adventures with an alien.
The 20-page picture book depicts her character falling asleep and dreaming about creating another universe where people come to live. When she finally awakens, she notices materials–such as remnants of a sand castle, a backpack and bicycle–from that universe and wonders whether it actually was a dream.
Maritza said she wrote the story over a period of a month when she was in the fourth grade at Blackford. Her class at the time was learning about the solar system.
“I enjoyed it a lot and I thought it’d be cool to write a book about the solar system,” she said.
Maritza, who lives in San Jose with her parents and sister, is already brainstorming ideas for the next book she’ll enter in the contest.
“I think it’s going to be realistic fiction,” she said.
And that may not be the last book for Maritza; she plans on being an author when she grows up.
“I really enjoy making up other worlds and coming up with new ideas,” she said.
Fantasy appeared to be a common genre among the winning stories this year. Serendipity Tinsley, 11, of San Jose wrote about a dream where she turns into a cheetah and meets another cheetah. In the book, Cheetah Girl, she and the other cheetah get hit by a car in Africa. When she awakens from a monthlong slumber, she realizes that she and her friend, Tashkey, were saved by humans, which are referred to as “pink things” in the book. The book ends with her going back to sleep and dreaming of her home and her mother waking her up for school.
“I like to just let my mind go off and just think of the craziest things, like dragons and that type of stuff,” the Monroe Middle School sixth-grader said.
The book, 21 pages in length and with pictures drawn by Serendipity, was written in the span of a little more than two weeks last year when she was attending fifth grade at Lynhaven.
The inspiration for Cheetah Girl came from her 2-year-old cat, Parsley. Cats and fictional stories, Serendipity said, are two of her favorite things. She, too, is already thinking about ideas for her next book.
“I think other people should try it if they have an active imagination,” Serendipity said. “This is one of the best ways to have an outlet, to let your imagination go wild.”
Bryceida Valencia, an 11-year-old from San Jose, was the only student who also won last year. Her book, La Pequeña Araña Problemática, was written in Spanish, as was last year’s winning book, La Hormiga Sin Amigos, or The Ant Without Friends. For Bryceida, who attends sixth grade at Sherman Oaks, a dual immersion school, writing in Spanish comes easily because it’s her first language, she said.
La Pequeña Araña Problemática, translated into The Problematic Small Spider, is a story about a spider named Daniela that tries to persuade her friend Sally to stop picking on her and show respect to others.
“The lesson is that if you don’t want others to do it to you then you shouldn’t do it to them,” she said. “If you don’t want them to pick on you, you shouldn’t pick on them.”
Bryceida wrote the 21-page story in the fifth grade over three months. She also drew pictures for the book. And though she aspires to become a dentist or teacher when she grows up, Bryceida plans on entering the contest yet again next year and continuing to write for pleasure. She said she especially enjoys writing stories based on her own real-life experiences. “I like writing because I can express myself,” she said.
The other 2012 Rising Young Author winners included Benjamin Bousquet from Capri; Amanda Silva from Castlemont; Alexis Weisend from Forest Hill; Callie Fitch from Marshall Lane; Jennifer Bueno from Monroe; Megan Tobias from Rolling Hills; Miguel Gonzales Aguirre from Rosemary; and Kassidy Tolbert from Village.
