About Us
THE YOUNG WRITERS WORKSHOP of the University of Virginia is a nonprofit arts organization established in 1982 as the nation’s flagship program for young writers. Now entering its fifth decade, it continues to lead the way in bringing together high school writers from across the country and internationally with a common purpose: to create a supportive, non-competitive environment where they can work together as artists in a dynamic residential environment.
The program offers four Genre Workshops which are shaped by the dynamic principles of play, invention, response, revision, performance, and publication. Participants invent, develop, and revise material using the writer’s most essential tools—language, imagination, and craft. They conference with instructors and peer writers, examine contemporary artists’ work beyond the high school canon, and become more discerning readers.
Poetry
Here’s where the ordinary and the extraordinary collide. Experimenting with craft and form, poets create whole worlds in just one line or image. They distill where they have been and what they know, shaped with luminous detail. Interested in songwriting? Here’s where song lyrics are born as well. You’ll discover the many ways to tempt your muse to the page and forge what follows into full blaze.
Fiction
From the real to the surreal, commonplace to unconventional, fiction writers learn how evocative narrative works: the power of provocative hooks, engaging characters, and a variety of story architectures that weave together complex lives. Inclined toward scripts? This is where you’ll also learn the full weight of dialogue. Focusing on developing a repertoire of voices, you’ll learn the narrative devices that lend themselves to stage or screen as well as the page.
Creative Nonfiction
Here’s where truth plays its hand in spades. Creative nonfiction writers deploy the devices of great fiction - but for crafting true stories. They take these skills into field assignments, practicing inventive moves through humor, memoir, editorial, travel writing, long-form journalism, and many others. Straddle the tenuous line between fact and fiction; (dare to) bring your truth to the page!
Short Form Creative Writing
Brief and boundary breaking, this hybrid form breaks all the rules of genre and reassembles them into rapier-like literary gems. This is not about writing the usual report or short story. It’s creating prose poems, flash fiction, micro essays, comics, graphic text, even innovative digital media. It’s combining playful structure and compressed language. It’s tackling a blank page in ways no one genre can do alone!
Exploratories in songwriting and scriptwriting (for both screen and play) are also offered as an integral part of the curriculum.
Before its founding in 1982 as the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop (YWW), residential programs for teenage creative writers didn’t exist.
Three observations by the program’s co-founder, Margo Figgins , gave rise to this innovative program: teens are most alive to themselves and to each other when they are being creative; their most powerful work occurs in collaboration with each other; and they will spend endless after-school hours absorbed in artistic expression if it is taken seriously.
To live as a writer is far from your typical summer camp experience. It means writing daily, sharing work with others, offering feedback and support, and maintaining an intentional balance between solitude and community. From its very inception, the Workshop has created this experience through a challenging daily schedule of workshops, labs, electives, readings, literary salons, and performances in a residential model that keeps all of its members, teaching writers included, strongly connected. The success of this approach, with its emphasis on experimentation, is evident in the Workshop’s growth, and its many evolutions. This diverse programming has no rivals.
The summer program was housed in various dormitories on the grounds of the University until 2010; in 2012, making its leap to the nearby Sweet Briar College campus fulfilled a long-held goal: to be an entirely residential program, with teaching writers and administrators in residence as well, in a retreat environment with “the writer’s life” at its center.
In truth, our story gets rewritten every year, with each new accomplishment of our members, some recorded as a part of this site. And at each summer’s end, as many as two hundred new young writers join the legion of alumni who mark YWW as a crucial turning point in their lives, alumni who find ways to live their lives more strongly, even bravely, keeping the sparks of creativity alive, no matter what path they choose.
A collection of books written by YWW alumni!