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Recent Highlights

Explore the Young Writers Project On VPR Program Archive »

Recent Episodes

  • Young Writers Project: A Love Plea Monday, 05/21/12 1am Colleen Knowles, a senior at Proctor High School, says she has always loved to write, but got really interested in it when she was a freshman.
  • Young Writers Project: A Requiem For Titanic Monday, 05/14/12 1am Evan Wing, of Milton, is a senior at Rice Memorial High School. “I started writing poetry in the third grade, moved on to short stories and essays, and wrote my first book during the summer before my freshman year,” he says. 
  • Sequoia Salasin-Burns's Poem "Maybe" Friday, 05/04/12 1am

    Sequoia Salasin-Burns, a 7th grade student at Brattleboro Area Middle School, says "I wrote this poem to try to get people to realize that if we keep treating the world the way we do, it is most likely going to become a terrible place to live."

  • Young Writers Project: Writing Words Monday, 04/30/12 1am Paige Tuttle, of Colchester, a sophomore at Rice Memorial High School, says she wrote this poem, "Writing Words," for her American literature class.
  • Young Writers Project: College Admissions Essay Monday, 04/23/12 1am Anna Rutenbeck, a long-time Young Writers Project writer, is a senior at Champlain Valley Union High School. She will be attending Bennington College next year.
  • Young Writers Project: My First Car Monday, 04/16/12 5am Jessica Austin, a junior at Essex High School, says of her writing: “I write all the time, forming little half-stories or even just one-liners in my head. Usually they don't make it to paper. With this piece, I had just driven my little standard transmission Honda Civic successfully for the first time, so I got on the computer and let my inner monologue run. I guess good things come to those who write.”
  • Orange peel smiles and banana phone calls Monday, 04/09/12 5am

    Mugdha Gurram, a seventh grade student at Brattleboro Area Middle School, says she is usually prompted to write a story after seeing a photo or video. "They remind me of something (or someone) from my life, or I imagine what it would be like to be in the main character's shoes. It's like living another life, through my writing."

  • Born into this world Monday, 04/02/12 5am Frida Rosner, who is in fifth grade at Marlboro Elementary School, says she was inspired to write this poem by a painting she made of a girl and a feather. "I erased the girl's face too many times and she ended up all wrinkly," Frida says. "It gave me the idea that her face could relate to the feather."
  • Do You Know? Monday, 03/26/12 5am

    Alexandra Contreras-Montesano is in Grade 5 at Champlain Elementary School in Burlington. She says she enjoys playing viola, dancing ballet and writing, "especially in the woods!" When she wrote this piece, she says, she was thinking about "what really makes the world go around, and I wrote it from the point of view of a person in love."

  • Life in a Dream Monday, 03/19/12 5am

    Taylor Carlson, of Newbury, Vermont, is a junior at Oxbow High School. "Writing has always been a part of who I am," she says. "For this piece, I truly was just in the moment, writing what I felt."

  • Marble Eyes Monday, 03/12/12 5am

    Caleb Hoh, a seventh grader at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington, started writing to small prompts in class, but soon became serious about his work and dedicated to the Young Writers Project. "Through reading responses and contested prompts I feel that I have learned to use the situations and feelings of real life to make my writing come alive," he says. "I even performed one of my pieces at a talent show with some friends...I like to write fiction, from action to intense scenarios, and I get caught up in whatever piece I write."

  • My Town Monday, 03/05/12 5am

    Kiera Loomis, who is in 5th Grade at Shrewsbury Mountain School, says she is motivated to write by the prompts provided by the Young Writers Project and she likes to be creative and share her experiences with others. Kiera loves animals, and dreams about being a veterinarian one day.

About Young Writers Project On VPR

Vermont Public Radio partners with the Young Writers Project to present selections of the work of young writers in Vermont.

Each week, VPR features on VPR.net a submission from the Young Writers Project. The work may be an essay, it may be non-fiction or fiction, or it may be poetry. The weekly selection might be a student blog post or it might be a video.

The idea is to provide another avenue to hear the voice of the people of Vermont, in this case, the young people of Vermont.

The collaboration is organized by Geoff Gevalt at the Young Writers Project and by Betty Smith, the producer of VPR's Commentary Series.

 

About the Young Writers Project

Young Writers Project (YWP) is an independent nonprofit that engages as many kids as possible in the act of writing, helps them get better at it and publishes their best work wherever possible. YWP believes good writing skills are vital to learning, critical thinking and success. YWP’s programs have proven to get kids to try harder, improve their skills and build communities of mutual respect.

YWP works directly with kids through a variety of programs led by youngwritersproject.org, an online teen community that is remarkable for its creativity and civility. It also works with teachers by providing them with digital classrooms and the training and mentoring to use this technology to transform their instruction.

YWP works with upwards of 10,000 young people and 300 teachers a year and publishes 1,200 students’ work in nine newspapers throughout the state and NH. YWP was founded by Geoffrey Gevalt, an award-winning journalist with 33-years experience as a writer and editor. Gevalt directs the program.