Celebrate Reading Literature Festival is an annual event, with three literary festivals on three Hawaiian Islands (Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, and Maui), that invites leisure readers from grade six through college to join authors, literature circle mentors, book club members, and readers of all ages to talk about their response to three of twenty-five listed works.

He Ho‘olaule‘a No Na Mo‘olelo o Na Wahine, “Distinctive Women in Hawaiian History” is an annual one-day conference in October showcasing the stories of women who greatly impacted the history and cultures of Hawai‘i and including a series of public programs, featuring dramatic readings of oral histories and other primary sources from previous conferences, held at community venues in the spring and summer.

Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival is an annual two-day weekend festival celebrating books, reading, and music in Hawai‘i and featuring 150 performances, presentations, demonstrations, signings and other events by over 350 celebrated local, national, and international authors, poets, storytellers, playwrights, crafters, songwriters, composers, arrangers, and musicians.  Every year HCH sponsors a  Humanities Pavilion and this year’s two-day forum theme was “Aural History: How Music Shaped the Culture of Hawai‘i.”

StoryCorps, a program of Hawai‘i Public Radio (HPR), is a national oral history project–in partnership with the Library of Congress–created to build an archive of the stories of everyday people in America. Last year HPR hosted the first Hawai‘i visit and set up four recording residencies of StoryCorps over the course of five weeks in May and June of 2011 on the islands of Hawai‘i, Kaua‘i, Maui and O‘ahu.  A total of 164 Hawai‘i interviews, with the permission on the participants, were archived and preserved in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.  Local broadcasts of the Hawai‘i StoryCorps series, which began airing on HPR in July, can be accessed by tuning in to Morning Edition (HPR-1) every Monday, 5 to 8:30 AM, and The Conversation (HPR-2) every Tuesday, 8 to 9 AM.  Hawai‘i StoryCorps projects can be heard on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/hawaiistorycorps.

Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award, which the HCH facilitates through the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Fund of the Hawai’i Community Foundation, stresses the role of poetic expression in defining and describing the human search for meaning.  It comes with a $1,000 cash prize in Tony’s name and memory.