Writer's Quest Winners

My bookplate I made is in the water. The shark is represented for all my ocean books. So is the ocean. "Henry" the boy who is swimming away from the shark is my book character in one of my books.

Landing on the moon
The shuttle door wide open
No one lives to tell

robots are around
we think they might be evil
call in the S.W.A.T. team

J. Velasco
In the arena
Everywhere people dying
Starving. Suffering

M. Bonilla
Earth is now destroyed
All of mankind is wiped out
Craters fill the world

A. Olukoya
On this sunless earth
I walk unseen, no violence
All by my strong self

S. Ruth
Screams are in the air
So scared, but I must go on,
They have turned on me

J. Walker
Treaty no longer
Aliens and humans dead
War is in our world

S. Ramirez
Day and day I rust
Twilight by twilight I serve
All for an alien.

L. Ledesma
We were side by side
In that grass that moves like waves
There then it happened.

D. Ojogwu
As the meteor strikes
earth is doomed, but
a hero rises

F. Silva
There, vast nothingness
our planet is doomed
super nova now

N. Forrest
Going through space
Planets and stars behind me
More to discover

Fairhope: The Origin of a Name

Fairhope has a simple, unique history. Iowan settlers moved here with the simple idea of establishing a pre-planned single tax community. They were fairly hopeful their idea would work.

Ernest Benny Gaston, an Iowa journalist and populist officer for the Populist Party encouraged a society to create individual initiative among common men. Henry George went with Gaston's idea about individual initiative, but argued that land should be common property made available to be used rather than for making money. George and his followers planned to raise all government revenue from a single tax on land values to a rental charge for the use of commonly owned land. Members of a club in Des Moines, Iowa promoting a single tax theory wanted to start an actual single tax community as an experiment. They made plans, wrote a constitution, and began to seek a place to start the community.

The committee looked all over the Southeast and in 1894 found a little piece of land near a body of water. The name Fairhope was thought of when the members experimenting with this single tax system said they had a "fair hope" of succeeding in the task. The name stuck. Originally called the Fairhope Industrial Association, the colony's name was changed in 1904 to the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation which still exists today. Going with George's system, the colony went with and issued 99-year leases. This meant that people could lease land from the government and renew it when the lease was up.

The early history of Fairhope was full of trial and error in trying to make the single tax theory work. Changes have been made through the years, and today all money paid into the Single Tax Corporation is for worthy projects that improve the community of Fairhope. The "fair hope" that the early founders had for a flourishing community succeeded.