Students at Oakland Park Alternative Elementary School in Columbus thought they were filing into an ordinary assembly. Instead, Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney walked out on stage, and the room erupted. The surprise visit happened Wednesday, bringing games, comic-drawing demonstrations and a stack of new books to the school library.
According to The Columbus Dispatch, Kinney is the author behind the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and his appearance at Oakland Park caught students off guard. The reaction was immediate and loud. As Yahoo Entertainment reported, students “almost broke out into a riot when he walked on stage.”
Kinney did not show up empty-handed. He gifted the school $1,000 worth of library books, including copies of his newest title, which had been released just the day before the visit, per the same account. The timing lined up with Oakland Park already standing out in another way: the school had the most books checked out from its library of any school in the region. Yahoo reported that Kinney visited to celebrate this pre-existing checkout achievement.
Trivia, Drawing Contests and a Perfect Score
Once the initial shock wore off, Kinney got the students working. He showed them how he builds his comics panel by panel, then led the room through trivia questions and drawing contests, the outlet's report noted. One competitor stood out above the rest of the school: librarian Mary Eberlyn, who swept the children's literature trivia round. The report stated she was “five out of five,” earning the school additional books in the process.
The visit comes nearly two decades after the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book launched the series in 2007. Since then, the franchise has grown into a global phenomenon, with more than 300 million copies sold worldwide, a figure also cited by BBC in its own coverage of Kinney's school visits overseas.
Part of a Wider Pattern of Surprise Visits
Columbus is not the only district to get the Kinney treatment. In November 2025, the BBC reported that Kinney bounded onto the stage at Seaham Trinity Primary School in County Durham, England, where students had been expecting a lecture from a regional textbook inspector instead. That visit celebrated the publication of Partypooper, the 20th book in the Wimpy Kid series, and Seaham Trinity is one of 600 schools supported by the National Literacy Trust's World of Stories programme, according to the BBC.
During that UK stop, Kinney said he wanted to inspire children to see themselves as illustrators and writers, telling students, “I am going to keep writing,” and inviting them to pitch ideas for future books, per the BBC's reporting. A similar pattern played out after the release of the series' 19th book, Hot Mess, when Kinney visited Polson Middle School in Madison, Connecticut, according to a Scholastic account of that stop.
Kinney's pattern of popping into classrooms stretches back years. The Los Angeles Times once documented him showing students at Franklin Avenue Elementary School how he develops ideas for his books, and Rumsey Hall School has also described a virtual session in which Kinney walked students through his drawing process. For Oakland Park's students, though, Wednesday's assembly turned an ordinary school day into one they are unlikely to forget anytime soon.
