READ! IMAGINE! CREATE!
2025/2026
Middle and High School Students Read
When The Emperor Was Divine
by Julie Otsuka
Read! Imagine! Create! Student Celebration – April 7th at 6:00pm
Neil Morgan Auditorium at the San Diego Central Library
Write Out Loud – an organization founded in 2007 with a commitment to inspire, challenge and entertain by reading literature aloud for a live audience – announces this year’s READ! IMAGINE!CREATE! celebrating the novel, When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka.
This event celebrates the creations of Middle and High School Students who have READ When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, RE-IMAGINED the images, themes, or characters from the book, and have CREATED a personal expression of the story. All artistic mediums qualify: painting, sculpting, musical composition, sewing, choreography, poetry, short story, digital art, fashion design, culinary creation… the list goes on! From painted skateboards to full-length operas, Read! Imagine! Create! encourages students to find something they relate to in a text and express it in a way that is meaningful to them.
Student visual art submissions are displayed through April 2026 at Mission Valley, Chula Vista South Branch and El Cajon public libraries. The Read! Imagine! Create! Student Celebration announcing the winning projects takes place on April 7th at 6pm at the Neil Morgan Auditorium at the San Diego Central Library.
Write Out Loud Artistic Director, Veronica Murphy, shared “After the distribution of free copies of When The Emperor Was Divine to 17 area schools, over 2,400 students have been working for months on their book inspired projects. This year’s selection is especially relevant as it tells the story of a Japanese American family’s incarceration during WWII. The Celebration of Student Creations, live streamed for the homebound, is always a highlight of the year for us.”
Ticket reservation for attendance: https://writeoutloud.ticketspice.com/read-imagine—create-student-awards-ceremony-2026
Link to the Livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/iEm9RPvGsSA?si=4phBmjAQ0iXjXw1z
About When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family’s possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert.
Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today’s headlines.About Write Out Loud
In addition to READ! IMAGINE! CREATE!, Write Out Loud serves over 30,000 people annually with their core programs: In their six show season of Story Concerts; Poefest – a celebration of Edgar Allan Poe and other writers of the macabre; Kamishibi AKA StoryBox for elementary students; Poetry Out Loud for high school students; Let Your Voice Be Heard – a K-12 Poetry Initiative; Stories for Seniors and American Literary Heroes – featuring Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
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