College of the Canyons will be hosting its second annual Santa Clarita Valley Book Festival in the COC University Center on its Valencia campus on May 10, with the organizers focusing this year’s event on getting students more interested in reading and writing.
“We were just trying everything last year to see what worked and what didn’t work,” said COC English professor and event co-organizer Ruth Rassool. “What we learned from that was that doing it when the semester is over is good in some ways, but we want to get the students more involved. So we brought it forward this year. And we’ve also learned not to scatter ourselves around the University Center. It’s a great space, but we needed to be more cohesive with that.”
“This year, as we started planning again, we said we’ll change the date,” Rassool continued. “And I went to (COC) President David Andrus to kind of just inform him that we were doing it again. He said, ‘OK, that’s great. Tell me what’s in it for students. Make sure that there is something in it for students.’”
Co-organizer Veronica Stanley-Hooper echoed the sentiment, being inspired by her daughter to help run the festival.
“My daughter was a creative writing major at CSU (Long Beach),” said Stanley-Hooper, who’s also in charge of the Santa Clarita Valley Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators group. “When she was in high school in Santa Clarita at Saugus, we were looking for ways that she could learn more about what a creative writing major meant, and how she could become immersed in, you know, a creative way in Santa Clarita.”
According to Rassool, the new SCV Book Festival will feature 80 authors, a 10-person increase from last year. The lineup includes Theresa Verner, a children’s book author and keynote speaker for the event.
“I’ve been an artist for many years, and I had done a painting that one of my friends said, ‘Oh, that looks like the cover of a children’s book,’” said Verner. “So very naively, I thought, ‘Oh, that would be fun.’ And I knew nothing about creating a book or publishing a book or anything. I did get the book self-published. It’s called ‘The Reading Tree.””
“I decided, after finding out that it took me a year to do the paintings for the book, and then it took me about another year to finish everything and get it published and all that, that I can’t really do that again,” Verner continued. “I need to focus on my art. But it was a great experience.”
Both Verner and her daughter, fellow author Sharon Chappell, have drawn on their own real-life struggles as inspiration for their work, a trait shared with many other authors set to be featured at the festival.
“We’re both breast cancer survivors, and her case was much more advanced than mine, so it was very traumatic,” said Verner, who is also legally blind. “So she dealt with that by using her creativity to help others.”
“She really has found a way to use her creativity to help her recover both physically and emotionally,” she added.
The festival also has the support of the College of the Canyons Foundation, in addition to other schools such as California Institute of the Arts and The Master’s University. Rassool and Stanley-Hooper have also helped to arrange several activities for literature fans of all ages to take part in.
“We’ve got a book-a-thon, which is kind of like a hack-a-thon that the tech community does all the time,” said Rassool. “But we’re using that model and making a hack-a-thon, book-a-thon for creative writing. So students will work in teams and compete against each other to create some kind of work ready for publishing.”
“I hope that everyone just leaves with a positive feeling about literature, about the written word on a page that’s authentic from a human being,” said Stanley-Hooper. “And you know, if it’s the little guys that come, I hope that they just leave with such a positive feeling about books. They want to go to the library, they want to buy some books at the festival, and they just want to keep reading them.”
More information about the SCV Book Festival can be found at events.canyons.edu/event/santa-clarita-valley-book-festival-1.
