Teens spend a week in our Young Authors’ Workshop

Teens spend a week in our Young Authors' Workshop
students writing up a storm at the 2013 Young Authors' Workshop

From August 5 through 9, an amazing group of twenty-two high school students joined us at Mission High School for our annual Young Authors’ Workshop. This year the workshop was structured around the theme Honoring diversity of experience, voice, and background: Ways of documenting the self.

During this intensive week of writing, students generated a portfolio featuring writing styles from literary journalism to fiction and poetry. They heard from guest speakers with areas of expertise ranging from writing young adult novels to archiving oral histories. Our young authors had the opportunity to work one-on-one with writing tutors to polish and perfect a personal narrative, which they proudly performed for friends and family at the end of the week. Look for these pieces compiled in the forthcoming chapbook How to Be Us. Here’s a sneak peek!

“Feel proud when someone compliments your writing. Be delighted when your favorite MUSE song pops up on Pandora. Feel excited when you think of your future as a fashion designer, CEO, toxicologist or whatever you feel like being at the moment. Dream about what it would be like to be a child genius, a music prodigy or an Oscar-winning actor; be glad that you’re not.”

–from “Four Steps to Being Me” by Sofiya Woodcock, age fifteen