The Girls Write Now Programs team spent the summer recruiting, enrolling, orienting and training a talented new class of mentors and mentees, building volunteer panels for college prep and therapeutic services, launching a new Youth Board and Poetry Collective, and preparing curriculum for the Writing and Digital Media Programs — all while polishing off our mentees’ college essays in time for this season’s deadlines!
Our class of 216 combined mentors and mentees hail from all five boroughs and originally from around the globe. Mentors are poets, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters and journalists who write everywhere from New York Magazine to the United Nations. Mentees are already blending and bending genres, redefining writing for the 21st century. We’ll be jumping into brand new workshops covering everything from Zine Poetry and Podcasting to Speech Writing and Sketch Comedy — with a phenomenal lineup of craft talk authors including Andrea Pippins (I Love My Hair) and Kamy Wicoff (Wishful Thinking).
At Girls Write Now, we are in a constant state of evolution as we write our stories across new genres and platforms, engage more deeply in our relationships, and use our voices to support the causes we believe in. For the 2015-16 program year, we’ll be focused on how our own personal evolution fits within an evolving community to ignite change for all. We call this: (R)Evolution, our 2015-16 annual theme. As we experiment as writers, activists, and women, we have the power to transform each other and the world around us. In the words of Adrienne Rich: “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”