Guest Contributor, Naomi Jeske, 17 Happy National Poetry Month! I know we do not all consider ourselves poets. We are, of course, all writers. But each of us has a unique relationship to words whether we write fantasy or memoir or realistic fiction. Poetry. We document the past or we predict the future. We are …
Written by Matthew Jellison, Associate Director of Education, Writopia Lab I’m struggling. This is good, actually. Isn’t struggle at the center of learning? I always remind the instructors at Writopia—the writing and education non-profit where I oversee the professional learning of our network of adult writers who teach writing to kids and teens—that discomfort can …
Hi Everyone! It’s Zoe Becker coming to you live from DC (certainly an interesting place to be right now) with this week’s Epistle! Weekly Epistles are generally written by Director of Teen Programs, Lena Roy, for those of us who are part of the year-long pre-college Creative Portfolio Program but I’ve wanted to contribute a …
On Tuesday, November 26th, 2024, we sent our community of young writers, parents, guardians, supporters, and educators a set of prompts and received dozens of lines of poetry in response. From all of that magic, we curated this holiday poem… by you and for you. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. “This Thanksgiving, I Am Not Alone”By …
By Matthew Jellison We were losing literary bingo when the thought hit us. We were surprised to be losing. After all, Malcolm and I have spent the better part of a decade working in literacy, and Yael about a decade and a half. We are (affectionately speaking) literary nerds. In the office we share, Yael …
by Bianca Turetsky At our last virtual retreat we took an exercise from Brene Brown’s book, Dare to Lead, and through the process of elimination discovered what our core values truly are. In the busyness of day to day life, particularly these past two years, it’s not a question we often give ourselves the time …
By April, the grueling 2020-2021 college admissions process will have to come to an end, with over five million high seniors finding out which colleges have accepted them during one of the most disheartening application years in decades. And just then, as the trees begin to blossom and the Covid-19 vaccine supply begins to meet …
by Madeline Taylor & Kimberly Faith Waid At our national staff retreat in 2019, our full-time staff came together to focus on teen leadership and the ways we could empower our young writers within our community and beyond. We’d run programs in the past, and we were ready to take it to a new level: …
Growing up, Passover (Pesach) overtook the spring curriculum in my school. Weeks were spent studying the Haggadah, creating our own, learning the laws and practices that had been passed down through generations. “The most important thing is to tell the story of the Exodus,” I remember one teacher explaining. “Even if one is having a …
It’s the first day of the staff retreat, 2020, March 12 to be exact. We are in the middle of nowhere in a beautiful retreat center in Connecticut, trees starting to bloom, purple crocuses pushing up their heads, reminding us that spring indeed does follow winter. COVID-19 still seems far enough away, and the impulse …