Amy Pine, librarian, will be participating in the Elgin Literary Festival (ELF) this weekend to promote her two original novels.

From 5pm Friday to 5pm Sunday, Side Street Arts in Elgin will host a free, all ages event where various authors hold book signings, workshops, panels, and more. Pine’s two published books, If Only and What If, will be available to purchase for $10 each. Along with selling books, Pine will also be on a panel about contemporary romance Saturday morning and will host a workshop for writers using social media on Sunday.

This will be the first literary event Pine will be participating in since she started writing in 2012. In the future, she hopes to do more events such as this one, but for now she is just looking forward to this weekend.

“[I hope to] meet people who will be new readers,” Pine said. “Also meeting other authors who are local that I don’t know, like meeting authors that I know their names, but I don’t know them personally type of thing.”

Pine first started to seriously write in 2012 when she worked at Fremd High School. There, an event called Writer’s Week where students write in workshops inspired Pine to carry out her dream of becoming a published author.

“Basically, [Writer’s Week] is a week long celebration of writing where every period of everyday, there’s either teachers or students or professional writers sharing their writing and journey to being published and stuff like that,” Pine said. “It was really seeing my students get up on stage and reading in front of 500 plus students that got me into thinking, ‘If they can be brave enough to do it, I can be brave enough to do it.’”

Pine currently has two new books in the works, One Night and One Life. Both are set to come out in 2015.