The Teen Writing Center was founded in the spring of 2013 by a group of local writers and high school creative writing teachers, led by Tupelo Press, to create a community for teen writers. We have begun with a charter group of high school teens from local public and private high schools, who are contributing to developing the program. We meet on a weekly basis through the generosity of The Writerhouse, and have provided our member teens with panel discussions on writing careers, hosted writing workshops by local guest authors and creative writing teachers, and offered a letterpress printing project at The Virginia Arts of the Book Center (VABC), in association with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
We are collaborating with other local non-profits, including The McGuffy Center, The Bridge P.A.I., and The Piedmont Council of the Arts, and plan on more (See our calendar), to introduce our young writers to the literary organizations in our community. The Virginia Festival of the Book is offering a “First Pages” panel for teens this year, for the first time. We want our teen writers to have no doubts about how much our community values the art of writing.
With the help and vision of our charter teens we plan on a winter chapbook, a spring reading series, and an anthology of teen writing for the area in 2013. We would like to bring this year’s National Student Poet for our region to Charlottesville, as she lives in Virginia! We seek to identify the resources to connect our young writers to the larger community and expand their experience as writers and as members of our literary community.
This program is available to any high school aged teen who is interested in writing.
Save the date and watch for our fundraiser at Charlottesville Cityspace on Sunday, November 17th, from 4-6pm, with a local jazz band, readings and more!!