Power of the Pen Behind the Scenes...

All of the entries for Power of the Pen are in and now you might be wondering, 'what are you doing with my poem/short story?'

Well, a few things! I (Kat) look after all the electronic entries and Marcel, the teen librarian at Central looks after all the print entries.

We have to check the entries to make sure they follow the guidelines and disqualify entries that go over the word count. We have to make sure that everyone has only submitted one poem and one short story. We also make sure that all entrants are between 12 and 18.

Next we go through and make sure entrant's names aren't on their poem or short story. We call this 'blinding'. We want to make sure that the judges don't know who wrote what so that the judging will be as fair as possible.

Once the entries are all blinded, we assign each entry a number and label them so when we get them back from the judges we'll know which entry belong to whom.

Still with me?

Once we do all that we attach each entry to a judging form and then divide the entries into their category (ie. 13 year old poetry, 15 year old short story). Next, the packages are finally ready to go to their judges!

So right now we're in the middle of printing, blinding and dividing up all those entries so we can get them to the judges. It's a big job but totally worth it!