2024 Reading and Writing Festival - April 30, 2024
Sponsored by the Six District Educational Compact, the
Reading and Writing Festival takes place at Kent State University every year for 7th and 8th grade students from local schools. Students will get to meet the guest author and participate in sessions involving book cover art, drama, poetry, and various writing contests, all pertaining to the Festival Books. Students also have the opportunity to meet and interact with professional storyteller and author
Kevin Cordi, who leads a storytelling workshop session during the Festival. See bottom of page for contact info and Festival details.
Our guest author this year is Ohio native
Natalie D. Richards.
Natalie spent many years applying her writing abilities to amazingly boring business documents. Fortunately for us, she realized that she is much better at making things up, and has been writing novels ever since.
She is now the author of many Young Adult and Adult novels including the newly popular Five Total Strangers (2020). See our catalog for her other titles.
Natalie writes “page-turning thrillers” (School Library Journal) for a Young Adult audience. Her new middle-grade book, through Penguin Random House imprint Delacorte,
is called 15 Secrets to Survival and is due out in 2023.
Four Found Dead (2023) will be Natalie’s ninth YA thriller from Sourcebooks Fire and is expected to be a bone chilling addition to her psychologically twisted work.
As a writer, she tends to write by the seat of her pants without much of a clue as to where she is going with each scene, often with the entire book as a whole. Natalie finds this helps her maintain an authentic edge of suspense in all her work because she honestly has no idea just how or even if her characters will get out of whichever mess she has written them into.
Natalie currently lives in Ohio with her three children and (very) large dog, Wookie. |  |
Reading and Writing Festival Books
2023-2024
The TMS Library has multiple copies of all of the Reading & Writing Festival books. Stop by the Library to check one out or place holds. From the
TCS homepage on the Quicklinks menu select
iSearch and search each book to find a summary of the book and to see if it is available to check-out or place holds. Or click on the book covers above to go directly to the catalog.
Or download the ebook from
SoraApp using your TCS login.
Click Here to be directed to the Stow Public Library to find out more about the festival.