PEN Center USA book launch

Have you ever heard of high school students publishing a book? The Honors Writing Seminar at LA River High School wrote a book titled “Book of Lies, Book of Lives Many Stories One Connection.” This book was a success and everyone was proud of each other.

The people who took part in this event were my classmates, my teacher, Ms.Benin Lemus, and our teaching artist from PEN Center, Mr. Antonio Sacre. This event featured the students presenting their work that took almost three months. The book launch was held on Dec. 8 at Occidental College’s Choi Auditorium.

This event showed that students had the potential to create work together, share their work with each other, and put in hard work into a book. The event went great, and the work my classmates and I did was amazing. The audience was supportive too.

About half the auditorium was filled with teachers, parents, and professors. Since the book was made in chapters, we presented by the order of the chapters.

I asked people what they thought about the show. My parents said, “The show was spectacular, we loved the poems.”

My history teacher, Ms. Leticia Ortiz, said, “I liked how everyone was dressed.”

One of my classmates, poet Johnathan Zacarias, said, “I liked the location [of the reading].”

These types of events are important because it shows that students can make something big and show what they are capable of doing. What I learned from all this is that if students work together and help each other out, they can make it far in the future.