Around the Park: 2 SP boys literary winners

For Solon Snider, 14, reading "The World to Come" by Dara Horn was a life-changing experience.

Describing how it had an impact on him in a letter to the author landed the eighth-grader at Severna Park Middle School first place in his grade level category in the 2009 Letters About Literature contest, a signature program of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The contest encourages students in grades 4 through 12 to read, be inspired, and write to an author who has somehow changed their view of the world or themselves.

Solon and Cameron Fitzgerald, a fourth-grader at St....