Page Turner DJP Family Productions

PAGE TURNER

DJP FAMILY PRODUCTIONS Diego and Dezirae Pena encourage and inspire with their stories.

Article By Alyson Turner Photography By Stephanie Harris

Everyone has a story to tell. Some people express their stories in song, dance, painting, or acting. Diego and Dezirae Pena—tell their stories through the art of writing. They worked together on their first book, My Sister’s Hand to show the importance of valuing your family members and showing you care. According to their bio, both young authors aspire to write more books and to help others. “DJP Family Productions is owned and operated by Diego and Dezirae Pena. Diego and Dezirae are brother and sister who live in Maryland. Aspiring to make their dreams come true, they set a goal to write books about their life and share it with the world. They have put serious effort to not only be great storytellers and young business owners. Diego is a rising 5th grader ready to place his mark on the world. He is working on his first solo book and plans to publish by the end of 2019. He aspires to attend New York University College to be a music and film producer when he grows up. Dezirae is a rising 3rd grader eager to explore the world. She was recently crowned Little Miss Virginia in USA East Coast Pageant. She is working on her solo book and plans to publish by the end of 2019. She aspires to attend Howard University school of Dentistry when she grows up.”

Their mother, Stephanie Harris, tells us that they began writing their stories as a family. “As a method to make reading more fun, we would create short stories together by putting [Diego’s] spelling words in the

stories. We had already started DJP productions in 2018 when his friends had said they wanted to buy some of our stories. We just wanted to create an easier and more fun way to learn.” Diego and Dezirae are the best of friends even though they are in different grades. They often study together and work on short stories together. “My daughter had to write a book for project at school. We [DJP Family Productions] had started a book, but for her assignment they worked on a new book together. Once that happened, we decided to make some edits to the book project and publish it.” In addition to fostering a love of reading, Stephanie has instilled good business sense and a desire to serve the community within her children, “I told them they should definitely think of a business that they would have to do all the work up front and earn residual income. It is hard to open a lemonade stand and set it up every week, when in fact you can work smarter and do something, for example, sell homemade packets of lemonade mix where you do the work up front.” Diego and Dezirae primarily work on the stories and ideas together. Stephanie then goes through the first several rounds of edits before sending to an editor. Since their first book, A Sister’s Hand, was published in 2019 they have been working on several stories to be published in the future. They want to expand their business, not only writing their own books, but selling other books and becoming widely published. So far all of their profits have been donated to charity and they have donated over 100 books. Diego and Dezirae have recently made meals for the Ronald McDonald House.

You can purchase your copy of A Sister’s Hand, a book about an older sister that no longer feels valuable to her younger sister at DJPFamilyproductions.com. You may also visit them on

Facebook.

Here’s The Scoop From Diego & Dezirae

What inspired you to write a book? We have always wanted to tell stories of about our life and all the wonderful things we do as a family. After vacations or family activities our mom would tell us to write a few sentences about what we did and how much we enjoyed it. We called it a memories journal. We would also use weekly spelling words from our school teachers to make short stories as a way to practice and our friends enjoyed reading them as well. How did My Sister’s Hand come about? How did you come up with this story? We wanted to make a story that most kids could relate too. Our two friends inspired the story when once visiting our home. The little sister wanted to join in some of the bigger kids’ activities and her older sister would become frustrated when being denied trying to help her. We knew most siblings don’t get along at times but we wanted to show how two siblings can still love each other even when they are not getting along. We thought of many different scenarios when siblings would fuss over things that were silly but had a bigger meaning behind the reason. What stories do you like to tell? We like to tell stories about things that everyone can relate too. Stories about life, life lessons, vacations, family and friendship. We plan to write more about things that could happen in children life.