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All About the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival on October 14!

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Notes from the Festival’s Founder!

For one glorious day each fall, authors, readers and their families flock to downtown Chappaqua for the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival (CCBF). Founded by a group of volunteers in 2013, the festival is now considered the preeminent children’s book festival in the tri-state area.

More than 90 children’s book authors and illustrators from as far away as Maryland fill the daylong festival with laughter, excitement and fun for children of all ages. Authors take the time for conversation and inspiration, to demonstrate the art of illustration and to read aloud favorite books in the adjacent St. Mary the Virgin’s garden. Attendees can expect festival favorites such as Rosemary Wells and Jane Yolen to return plus new authors such as Betsy and Ted Lewin and Roxie Munro.

Illustration by Sujean Rim

Families can find additional activities from book making to balloon animals to a Gaga pit in the family fun area. Food trucks and the Great Chappaqua Bake Sale provide many lunch options and scrumptious dessert and treats.

Since it’s inception The Great Chappaqua Bake Sale has raised more than $130,000 for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign and has connected children with more than 1.3 million meals. “It’s hard to believe this will be our eighth year working to raise monies to fund school and summer meals programs for kids in New York State. The Great Chappaqua Bake Sale community of supporters and volunteers make this event successful each year and we are particularly inspired by the many children who devote their time and passion to helping children in need,” noted Alison Spiegel, one of the Bake Sale founders.

A portion of the proceeds from the CCBF go to JCY-WCP literacy programs in schools throughout Westchester. The fifth annual CCBF is on Saturday, October 14th, from 10-4 pm. Admission is free. Cash and credit cards are accepted for book and food purchases. Free parking all day available at the nearby Chappaqua Metro-North train station.

For information on sponsorship and volunteering, visit www.ccbfestival.org or visit us on Facebook at Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival.

This Just In…New Not to Be Missed Authors


Betsy and Ted Lewin – Author and/or Illustrator of almost 200 children’s books plus recipients of numerous awards including the Caldecott Honor Book Medal and the NY Times Best Illustrated Award


Julie Fogliano – Author of beloved books including When Green Becomes Tomatoes: Poems for All Seasons and Old Dog Baby Baby


Roxie Munro – Author/Illustrator of more than 40 nonfiction and concept books for children using “gamification” to encourage reading, learning and engagement; NY Times Best Illustrated Award recipient


Stephen Savage – Author and Illustrator of 9 books for children, including the NY Times bestselling picture book Polar Bear Night, written by Lauren Thompson and creator of the Where’s Walrus? books, Supertruck and Little Tug

Donuts for Everyone

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Photos by Andrew Vitelli

Nice weather, live music, and fresh-baked donuts brought hundreds of local residents and visitors to the 5th Annual Cider and Donuts Festival on Sept. 18 at Wampus Brook Park in Armonk.

The festival included games and rides for children and plenty of food (including warm donuts from Beascakes Bakery in the hamlet) for kids and parents alike. For the second year, the festival partnered with Jamie’s 5K Run for Love, with proceeds benefiting the North Castle Public Library’s children’s programs as well as the Armonk Chamber of Commerce. The festival merged this year with the Pre-School Association Fall Carnival.

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Highlights for the 2016 Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival: “Be a Part of Our Story”

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Be-A-Part-of-our-Story

By Dana Y. Wu

Our bucolic suburban hamlet with its excellent schools and vibrant community support for literacy is the perfect setting for the 4th annual Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival (CCBF) on September 24. This free, day-long event attracts thousands of families from Westchester and beyond to meet 90 authors and illustrators including award-winners Chris Raschka, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Jane Yolen.

Children’s authors and illustrators share a similar hope–to imagine a better world through images and ideas in books. Book lovers know the particular joy of putting a book into young hands and seeing curiosity greatly inspired by imagination.

Eric Velasquez says his book, Liberty Street, a story of a slave girl’s escape, is one of his favorites, “because the closer the little girl in the story gets to being free, the closer she gets to literacy.”

Writing as Activism

At a master class hosted at the Library of Congress, Kwame Alexander, the 2015 Newberry Award winner for The Crossover, said that “writing children’s books is activism.” Given recent events that signal a more polarized world, the CCBF is our community’s way to acknowledge, appreciate and celebrate both differences and commonalities in our increasingly multicultural and multilingual society.

Velasquez continues, “When I was a child, very few children’s books had characters that looked like me. I remember feeling left out and uninterested in reading.”

Today, his deeply moving drawings are rendered with realistic details so children see themselves, their friends and their families in his books, but also see outside themselves.\“Children need both windows and mirrors. Too much of one and not enough of the other can seriously impair the intellectual growth of a child, especially their sense of empathy,” says Velasquez.

Author/illustrator Nick Bruel, creator of this year’s CCBF poster “Be Part of Our Story” makes a conscious effort to be inclusive and authentic in his laugh out loud books which are about a cantankerous cat.

Bruel says, “In A Bad Kitty Christmas,” I needed to depict generations within the same family. I made several characters, Black, Asian and Hispanic, and I included a LGBT couple. I debated with myself–do I write a book that could potentially speak to that kid who actually has two Mommies? I recognized that there would be people who would be offended. Like it or not, that kid exists and deserves to see his/her world represented in a book. Over the years, I received many, many angry missives over the very brief mention of Nan and Pam and even a school in Houston banned my book.”

Shared Priorities

The CCBF is our community’s way to promote reading, freedom and the power of discernment–keys to our children’s success in the 21st century world. Our town’s recent capital bond vote enables our schools and the Chappaqua Library to be “active and dynamic learning environments where students engage in meaningful inquiry, invention, interaction, hypothesizing, collaboration, and personal reflection.” It demonstrates our shared priority that students think deeply, apply problem-solving skills, and actively participate in their learning. The CCBF represents the desire for all our kids and teens to experience a broader world through the pages of a book, with empathy in their hearts and critical thinking in their minds. Barry Graziano of Houlihan Lawrence says, “the CCBF “is a great example of bringing the community together for a great cause. By empowering our children with the art of reading and language, we open a world of culture.”

Here’s what to look forward to:

  • “Be Part of Our Story” Join the all-day excitement of the CCBF at the Robert E. Bell Middle School–rain or shine–Sept. 24th.
  • Meet and greet favorite authors and beloved illustrators at readings and book signings.
  • Healthy fun with live music, STEM challenges with Regeneron, and games courtesy of Kiwi Country Day Camp.
  • Enjoy treats from the food trucks and the always wonderful “Great American Bake Sale to End Hunger” at tables on the Great Lawn of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

“Banned Books Week” Sept. 25- Oct. 1, 2016

This annual event sponsored by the American Library Association celebrates the freedom to read, to seek and to express ideas, even those ideas which some consider unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.

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Cider, Donuts and Racing Mark Chamber’s Fall Festival

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By Justin Ellick

The 5th Annual Cider and Donuts Festival, previously called the Armonk Fall Festival, is coming to Wampus Brook Park. The event, sponsored by the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, will be held Sept. 18 and gathers residents and merchants of Armonk to welcome the changing of seasons and to reflect on yet another spectacular summer.

Cider & Donut 5

The festival, which brings together the town’s residents for a day of activities each year, focuses on Armonk’s long history as a cider and donut hotbed. Over the years, the festival has grown rapidly, with more events and more guests showing up every year. Last year was the first year the Cider and Donut Festival partnered up with Jamie’s 5K Run for Love, and the Chamber of Commerce is confident that the race’s popularity and participants will skyrocket this year as a result of the great success of last year’s festival. This year, the Chamber decided to add on another wing to the festivities, as the Byram Hills Pre-School Association and its annual carnival will join the fun. With so many activities to get through in so little time, people are excited to see what kind of impact the festival has on the small hamlet of Armonk.

“Ideally we’d like the festival to serve as a way of getting Armonk values and the people who display them out in the open a little more,” said Neal Schwartz, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Armonk is filled with many small businesses trying to expose themselves to a wider range of consumers. The festival offers a great opportunity for these small-business owners to increase business as well.”

Mike Dardano Photos
Mike Dardano Photos

The festival, running from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., is the largest it’s ever been. The fun will start with some races, as the kids will get a chance to test their speed with the Donut Dash (ages 2-8) at 10 a.m., followed by the McIntosh Mile at 10:10 a.m. After the children have had their fun, Jamie’s 5K Run for Love is set to begin at 10:30 a.m. This portion of the festival is a continuation of a popular annual event, with runners coming from all over to honor the late Jamie Love, who was a track and field star at both Byram Hills High School and the University of Vermont. This year, net proceeds from the run will benefit the North Castle Public Library’s children’s programs along with the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, so that the town can continue to run popular programs and events.

Once the festival and races start at 10 a.m., non-racing attendees can jump right into the Cider and Donut Festival games and activities. These will include donut fishing, as well as pie-eating contests and dunk tanks. The donuts, from Beascakes Bakery, will be freshly out of the oven, practically melting in festivalgoers’ mouths. To accompany the donuts, there will be plenty of apple cider to go around.

This year, the festival is merging with another popular Armonk event in the Pre-School Association Fall Carnival. This will also get underway at around 10 a.m., with rides and activities for children, as well as pizza and ice cream. The festival has become an Armonk tradition, and one that continues to grow.

Cider and Donut Kids pie eating 2014

“Our first year, all we had was a couple of booths and limited activities, along with the fact that not many people attended the festival,” continued Schwartz. “In under five years we’ve been able to grow significantly the festival and the events it offers, and in turn have attracted more and more people every year.”

The Cider and Donuts Festival has quickly become one of Armonk’s biggest events of the year, as local merchants and residents of Armonk look forward to coming together as a community.

For more information, visit http://www.armonkchamberofcommerce.com/

Greeley grad Justin Ellick, a sophomore Media and Communications Major at Ursinus College in Philadelphia, is an intern for Inside Chappaqua and Inside Armonk Magazines this summer.

Fun for all at First Thursday

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Mike Dardano Photos
Mike Dardano Photos

By Sarah Jane Weill

This summer, on the first Thursday of every month Armonk Square comes alive with fun, laughter, and dancing. These nights are appropriately called First Thursday, an event designed by the Armonk Chamber of Commerce to offer “art, music, in-store promotion, dining, wine tastings and more” for the Armonk community and its residents. A First Thursday night, lasting from 5-9 p.m., has occurred in June, July, and August so far. The last one will take place on September 3rd.

With the newly built Armonk Square, the town now has the opportunity to host even more exciting events. “The Chamber had been working to bring some distinctive events to town with the intent to bring more business to the businesses,” explains Armonk Chamber of Commerce President Neal Schwartz. Therefore, the creation of First Thursday seemed a great way to combine Armonk’s wide variety of restaurants with music and art for a whole evening of activity that would appeal to residents and benefit business. “First Thursday was a natural fit during the warmer summer months,” he adds when comparing it to some of the Chamber’s other popular events such as Frosty Day, a Cider and Donut Festival, and Citizen of the Year golf outing and dinners.

So far, it seems that First Thursday is working out great. “Overall the merchants are very happy with the launch of First Thursday this year,” says Schwartz. “All had customers that came in because of First Thursday.” This past First Thursday on Aug. 6th was no exception. “First Thursday was a gutsy move during the summer, when so many students and parents are literally out of town. But, to our delight, this past First Thursday had more attendees and a constant flow of families with strollers and dog walkers; crystal clear indicators that these [visits to the event] were planned in advance,” Schwartz reports.

Visiting the August First Thursday, there was no doubt as to the great success of this event. These are events for all. People can come and go as they please, enjoying the festivities in their own way. Indeed, there is a range of people in the square during the First Thursday: some people are milling about, circling the town, doing errands or going to dinner. Other people are sitting on benches, talking among themselves or just listening to the music, taking in the evening slowly. Waves of more and more people come throughout the night, assuring that the square was never empty during First Thursday.

“I think it’s a great community builder and great that the merchants buy into it. It’s something to do,” Armonk resident Barbara Reiter says as she describes how she thinks First Thursday has added to the community. “Look at all the little kids” she continues, nodding to a group of adorable kids dancing with pure delight in the middle of the square, “when my kids were little I wish they did this!”

Indeed, this is a perfect atmosphere for families. The whole center of the square is filled with thrilled young children: all running around, dancing up close and personal with the live musicians, their faces sticky with frozen yogurt. For them, it seems, this is a perfect opportunity to release that final bit of energy coursing through their veins after a day at camp or playing with friends. Also, this past First Thursday there was a juggling stilt-walker, who turned out to be great entertainment for children, and people, of all ages.

Mike Dardano Photos
Mike Dardano Photos

Just think–this great success has only been achieved in three nights of First Thursday. Looking forward, the possibilities to expand and strengthen the event are numerous. “We know it takes time to further develop First Thursday, but our start in 2015 has been great,” Schwartz concludes when addressing what the future might hold for First Thursday. “We plan on adding more Armonk talent to First Thursday and more art in 2016,” he added.

The effort to put on a successful event like this is enormous, and it shows. Those behind it: Robby Morris, Stacy Wilder, and plenty of others, truly worked hard to create an event that would draw people out of their homes to enjoy all that small town life has to offer while promoting local business. Indeed, all of the necessary ingredients came together in crafting this event. It’s a wonderful way to spend the waning hours of a hot summer’s Thursday, and we can’t wait for the next one.

Sarah Jane Weill attends Bowdoin College. She is a member of the Horace Greeley Class of 2014.