BY MORGAN SCHAMING

Staff Writer

When most people hear of major events at Baldwin High School, they think Friday night football games or track invitationals. This year, the South Hills Gifted Consortium took to the academic side and engaged 12 local schools in the South Hills Literary Festival.

Baldwin High School hosted this event on Monday in the LGI rooms and the auditorium.

Many Pittsburgh-area schools used to attend a different literary festival organized by Seton La-Salle. Due to scheduling conflicts, the South Hills Gifted Consortium decided to host its own.

“The old festival was always set for the end of the year, and either fell on the week of Keystone tests or a day of an AP test. We wanted to ensure that every student was eligible to participate,” gifted coordinator Debbie Reynolds said.

Twelve South Hills school districts were slated to bring a total of 40 to 50 teams to compete. They were tested on their knowledge of selected books each participant had to read.

High school teams had to read five books: The Maze Runner, The Lost Legacy, Night Circus, Home, and Unbroken.

Middle school teams were required to read The Maze Runner, The Lost Legacy, Three Times Lucky and The Last Lecture.

The event itself was be comprised of four parts. The first included a guest speaker, Annette Dashofy, the author of one of the books the students were required to read, The Lost Legacy.

The second event was a “Battle of the Books,” a trivia game on all of the required books.

The third event was a rendition on the famous Ellen DeGeneres game, “Heads Up.” The cards have to do with important ideas and characters from each novel.

Prior to the competiton day, the teams were responsible for creating a movie trailer for one of the books. For the fourth event, trailors were shown in the LGI to every team and they voted on the best one.

Sophomore Sydney Crouch has been going to the English festival for two years,

“This year is a totally different competiton. As long as you pay attention to the book and understand it, you can do really well. It is lot of fun and more people should pariticipate next year,” Crouch said.