It came long before the Harry Potter controversies. 
In fact, Calvin College has been hosting its Young Authors Festival for local school children since 1977. 
The 2000 edition of the Festival, scheduled for Saturday, May 6 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., will mark the 24th consecutive year that Calvin has invited local youth to its campus to explore the magical world of books.
This year's Young Author's Festival features two tracks. 
In the first the over 1,000 local 1st through 8th graders (who represent some 100 public, parochial and charter schools in West Michigan) have a chance to get together in small groups and talk about the books that they wrote during the 1999-2000 school year. Each of those small groups is facilitated by a Calvin student. In all some 150 Calvin students volunteer their time that day for the Festival. 
One such student, Adam Navis (above), will work the YAF this year after attending the Festival in the late 1980s as a student. And he still has the book he wrote.
The second track features talks by professional authors who tell the students about their approach to writing and illustrating. This year the authors -- Louis Sachar, Miriam Bat-Ami and Janet Stevens -- are an award-winning trio of writers who aim their work at young people and create thoughtful, moving and enjoyable literature. 
Sachar might be considered the John Grisham of children's books. He graduated from law school in 1980 and worked part-time as a lawyer while writing children's books. Soon his books were selling so well he quit law to write full-time. His recent book "Holes," aimed at grades 5-8, won two of the biggest awards in the book business: the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Newbery Medal. 
Stevens writes for younger children with such titles as "My Big Dog" and "To Market, To Market." She also aims at older audiences with such books as "Old Bag of Bones, A Coyote Tale" and "Gates of the Wind." Her most decorated book is "Tops & Bottoms," which has its roots in European folktales and the slave stories of the American south. "Tops & Bottoms" earned some 12 awards, including a Caldecott Honor. 
Finally Bat-Ami is author of a work of historical fiction called "Two Suns in the Sky." Bat-Ami based the book on research done at a refugee camp in Oswego in upstate New York, the only refugee safe haven that existed in the U.S. during World War II. The book tells the tale of an American Catholic girl who falls in love with a Jewish refugee from Yugoslavia, "Two Suns in the Sky" received last year's Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Bat-Ami lives in Mattawan, Michigan, and is a professor of English at Western Michigan University. 
This year, for the second time ever, Calvin also is offering a more intensive workshop for middle school students. 
In addition to participating in a plenary session with Miriam Bat-Ami and Louis Sachar, they will take part in workshops with local professional writers, including John Douglas, Chris Meehan and Dan Hawkins from the Grand Rapids Press; Tom VanHowe from WOOD TV-8; local freelancer writers such as Joan Huyser-Honig and Kate Convissor; local poet Linda Nemec Foster; Walter Lockwood from Grand Rapids Community College; and a variety of Calvin professors. 
Finally, on Friday, May 5 the Calvin English department will host "A Conversation with Authors and Illustrators" at 7:30 p.m. in Gezon Auditorium. The conversation will feature Sachar, Stevens and Bat-Ami. That event is separate from the Young Author's Festival and is free and open to the public.