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Girls Write Now Volunteer Event | July 31, 2013

By Annie Nybo

Editors, pay attention: there’s some new talent in town! How do we know? Well, in May and June, members of the Early Career Committee were delighted to volunteer with Girls Write Now to support their 2013 Chapters Reading Series. Girls Write Now is a fantastic organization aiming to make girls heard. Their mission is “to provide guidance, support, and opportunities for at-risk and underserved girls from New York City’s public high schools to develop their creative, independent voices, explore careers in professional writing, and learn how to make healthy school, career, and life choices.” In order to do that, they pair young women in public high schools with professional women writer mentors to nurture and support the mentee’s creative and intellectual talents. And at the Chapters Reading Series, those talents were on full display.

Here the ECC ushered excited family and friends into Scholastic’s stadium-seated auditorium, where the girls would read selections from this year’s work. After a keynote address from Gayle Forman, author of If I Stay, at the May event and Marcia Ann Gillespie, former president of Liberty Media for Women and co-author of Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration at the June reading, the girls took the stage.

These women were remarkably well spoken, and their writing was beautiful and evocative. One mentee shared an autobiographical piece about learning to knit with her brusque and decidedly-not-cuddly grandmother, who would often poke her with the knitting needles and grumble during their sessions. Another wrote about picking up relatives from the airport, seeing them for the first time in years and bringing them home to share a small apartment. Still others discussed the sadness of watching snow fall or the horror of discovering a body in the woods (the latter, the author gleefully assured us, was purely fictional).

Poetry, nonfiction, short stories, and essays, all were on display these nights, and as publishing professionals, it was an honor to be able to assist Girls Write Now in their mission and encourage these young women in their writing. And after the show ended, when mentees hugged their mentors, arms brimming with flowers from admirers and sometimes crying with happiness, we were thrilled right along with them, happy to take part.

Learn more about Girls Write Now at www.girlswritenow.org.