The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is delighted to partner with the Ray Bradbury Foundation for the first-ever Ray Bradbury Read-A-Thon! The Foundation is the underwriter of the 2021 Scholastic Awards’ Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction & Fantasy.

To honor the anniversary of famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s 100th birthday, a virtual reading of his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 will be available for viewing online from August 22 to September 5, 2020.

Some 40 individuals, including celebrities William Shatner and Rachel Bloom, authors Neil Gaiman and Marjorie Liu, and Scholastic Awards alumni Sam Bowden, Minnie Zhang, and Emory Brinson, recorded themselves reading short passages from the book. These passages were edited together to form one continuous reading of the entire novel. The videos were filmed at the readers’ homes, at their local libraries, and at the places where Bradbury himself lived, worked, and explored. Locations include the historic rooms of partnering organizations the Los Angeles Public Library and the Library of Congress, as well as the former Carnegie Library building in Waukegan, IL, where the author spent much of his childhood lost in books.

We hope you’ll tune in for this celebration of Bradbury’s contribution to the literary landscape and our collective imagination. He is one of the best-known writers of our time, and his books now sit on library shelves alongside the works of authors he read in his youth at the Carnegie Library in Waukegan. After his family moved to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, he discovered the stacks of the Venice library and many others: no matter where he lived, the library was his school. As Bradbury would later say: “I’m completely library educated. Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn’t afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.”

The recording will be available for viewing beginning August 22 at 4:30 pm ET. You can save the date for the event via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/217495333007350/.