BATON ROUGE, La. – The Louisiana Center for the Book in the State Library of Louisiana announced the 2019 Louisiana winners of the annual Letters About Literature contest. This year, 242 fourth- through twelfth-grade Louisiana students wrote personal letters to authors, living or dead, to explain how their work changed the students’ way of thinking about the world or themselves. The winners of the competition represent cities from Ruston to New Orleans and were inspired by works ranging from fiction to nonfiction, science fiction to realism, and including books by a former president and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
Winning students receive $100 for first place, $75 for second place, and $50 for third place, and they will be recognized at the Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, November 2, in Baton Rouge, with the first place winners reading their letters there. Louisiana’s first place winners’ entries have been submitted to the Library of Congress for the national competition.
The winners of Louisiana’s 2018-2019 Letters About Literature contest are:
Level I (grades 4 – 6)
1st Place: Annika Roberson, Trinity Episcopal School, New Orleans
2nd Place: Kelon George, Prairie Elementary School, Lafayette
Level II (grades 7 – 8)
1st Place: Phoenix Chapital, Lusher Charter School, New Orleans
2nd Place: Magnolia Charlet, Northwestern Middle School, Zachary
3rd Place: Lauren Poole, Winfield Middle School, Winnfield
Honorable Mention: Rain Monroe, Lusher Charter School, New Orleans
Level III (grades 9 – 12)
1st Place: Donovan Turpin, Cedar Creek School, Ruston
2nd Place: Marie Foret, Ursuline Academy, New Orleans
3rd Place: Lauren Shirley, Cedar Creek School, Ruston
Honorable Mention: Zachary Nichols, St. Paul’s School, Covington
Read the winners’ letters and see the names of all the state finalists [icm-tracking.meltwater.com] and their teachers and schools.
