Exploring Creative Writing for Youth

Service Description

PorchLight Literary Center offers a new opportunity for youth to have fun with and find agency though writing. These week-long programs invite youth to explore their feelings and identities, or to imagine new realities through the written word. This summer our week-long programs will focus on the development different kinds of writing skills and how they can help us move through life. Exploring Creative Writing Our youth camp will introduce children to different modes and approaches to writing; from poetry, comics, and fantasy, to mixed media arts. At the end of the week, children will participate in a group reading at PorchLight, bring home a finished project, and be able to talk about their interests and insights with the people they love. These classes are designed for children going into 4th through those coming out of 6th grade. Our day will start at 9:00 and end at 1:00. Early drop-off is available. Please contact Jennifer Colville (jennifer@porchlightliterary.org) with any questions. Our instructional team: Margaret Yapp is the author of Green for Luck (EastOver Press, 2024). She is CEO, President, and Intern at Rampage Party Press and works as the Managing Editor of Prompt Press, amongst other gigs. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book Sarah Elgatian is a writer, educator, and activist whose work blurs genre lines and asks questions. Among other places, her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Crab Fat, Beholder Magazine, and print anthologies including Fifth Wheel Press’s Flux and the Iowa Writers’ House We The Interwoven. Marketing and Program Specialist at the Midwest Writing Center, Sarah facilitates the bi-monthly workshop group Writers’ Studio and the webseries Write More Light. Jennifer Colville is the founding editor of Prompt Press, a project connecting visual artists, book artists and writers. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Her collection of short stories Elegies for Uncanny Girls was published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. She is the director of PorchLight Literary Arts Center and a professor of creative writing at Coe College.