Oce and School District of Palm Beach County Tap Six Local Authors to Teach First-Ever 'Future Authors of Palm Beach' Camp
Eight-Day Camp for 9th and 10th Graders Starts June 12
BOCA RATON, Fla., June 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Oce, (NASDAQ:OCENY), a Boca Raton-based leader in digital document management and delivery solutions, and the School District of Palm Beach County announced they have enlisted six local published authors to participate in the district's first- ever free summer camp for local 9th and 10th graders interested in becoming authors. Participating authors include Mary Monroe, Max Ruback and four well- known journalists -- Scott Travis, Eliot Kleinberg, Frank Cerabino, and Leslie Gray Streeter.
The purpose of the camp is to improve students' writing skills and provide them with a hands-on understanding of how authors become published. Students will gain insight into the process of writing, editing, and digitally publishing books along with an understanding of real business processes through interactions with published authors.
Twenty high school students, recommended by their English teachers and guidance counselors, will participate in the free, eight-day Future Authors of Palm Beach Camp, which is being held at Boca Raton High School June 12-16 and June 19-22. Works produced by the students during the camp will be printed digitally and bound into a book by Oce Digital Document Systems, a local corporate partner in education for the Palm Beach School District.
Palm Beach educator, Stephanie Tomaselli, will facilitate the camp the first week while Steve Woloszn, a teacher and consultant with the South Florida Writing Project, will be the week two facilitator, according to English Language Arts Curriculum Administrator for the District Mary Wilkeson, who is coordinating camp details. "We're thrilled that Oce is helping make this unique educational opportunity possible," she said. "We look forward to this camp becoming an annual summer offering."
Monroe is a Forest Hill High School reading teacher and author of Miracle at Monty Middle School. Max Ruback has published fiction and essays in numerous magazines. In 1999, he was awarded a Florida Individual Artist Grant in Fiction. Twice, his stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This past December, his story, Monsters, was read at the New York Public Library. Scott Travis is a staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where he has written more than 1,200 stories, mostly focusing on educational issues. He was part of a team of reporters that was twice nominated, in 2004 and 2005, for a Pulitzer Prize for hurricane coverage. Eliot Kleinberg, a writer for the Palm Beach Post, is a Florida native who has written eight books, all focusing on Florida. A news columnist for the Palm Beach Post, Frank Cerabino has written five novels and a play for teenagers that has been published and performed in several states. He also writes and delivers commentaries for Fox 29. He currently is working on a set of short stories set in Florida. Streeter writes the "Flick Chick" column for the Palm Beach Post.
These authors, together with certified Palm Beach language arts teachers, will help students explore various writing styles and discover what it takes to become a published author. At the conclusion of the camp session, a panel of authors, teachers and corporate executives will review their written camp projects and select three to receive special recognition and placement in the published book. The works of all students will be included in the final book, which will be printed by Oce in October at Graph Expo in Chicago. All students will walk away from the camp with a better understanding of the publishing process and how it helps bring more diverse books to the market.
According to Oce Digital Document Systems Vice President of Marketing Joyce Virnich, this partnership with the School District of Palm Beach County underscores the company's commitment to education. "This camp is a perfect vehicle for inspiring young people to pursue their love of writing and to appreciate what goes into a published work," she said. "We're honored to be a part of this program and look forward to its growth and expansion in future years."
Whole Foods is donating lunch for the students for four days of the camp.
About Oce North America
Oce is a leading provider of digital document management technology and services. The company's solutions are based on Oce Digital Document Systems' advanced software applications that deliver documents and data over internal networks and the Internet to printing devices and archives-locally and around the world. Supporting the workflow solutions are Oce digital printers and scanners, considered the most reliable and productive in the world. Oce also offers a wide range of display graphics, consulting and outsourcing solutions.
Netherlands-based Oce N.V. (NASDAQ:OCENY), with a workforce of around 24,000 people and pro forma annualized revenues of nearly $3.7 billion, active in approximately eighty countries, maintains research and manufacturing centers in the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Oce's North American headquarters is located in Chicago with major business units in Trumbull, CT; Chicago; New York City; Boca Raton, FL; Salt Lake City; Coventry, RI; and Vancouver, BC. North American revenues were $1.7 billion for fiscal 2005, and employment is currently 11,000. For more information about Oce, visit www.oceusa.com/ .
Source: Oce
CONTACT: Nat Harrington of Palm Beach Schools, Public Affairs,
+1-561-434-8228, or Carro Ford Weston, +1-859-737-2816,
+carrof@earthlink.net ,
or Ellen Schulman, +1-954-895-3152, eprosep@bellsouth.net
Web site: www.oceusa.com/
