Students competing at three levels — upper elementary grades, middle school and senior high school — wrote a personal letters to authors from any genre — fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or classic — explaining how his or her work changed their view of the world or themselves. The ceremony is set for 11:30 a.m. Saturday.

Jenna Bleu Forti, a fifth-grader from Aina Haina Elementary School, won the elementary-level award for her letter to author Gail Carson Levine about "Ella Enchanted."

A Kahuku High and Intermediate student, Gerrit DeWeese, picked up "Surfing the Himalayas" when a broken eardrum kept him from surfing for two months. In his winning entry, the seventh-grader admitted to author Frederick Lenz that although he doesn't "think about life as deeply as" the snowboarder in the story, the book made him think about looking for the positive in seemingly negative situations.

Contest judges commended high school-level winner Sarah Panoke, a sophomore from Nanakuli High and Intermediate, for "connecting in a fundamental way with the feelings inherent in William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'"

The winning essays, selected from hundreds of entries written by Hawaii students, have been submitted to the national contest. Winners of that contest will be selected by the Library of Congress Center for the Book in September at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.