Established in 1982 as the nation’s flagship program for young writers, the University of Virginia‘s Young Writers Workshop brings together writers from across the country and beyond to create a supportive, non-competitive environment where teenage writers can live and work together.

Through the program participants learn strategies to invent, develop, and revise material using the writer’s most essential tools—language, imagination, craft, sight, and insight. All of this while they work instructors and peer writers.

The program has focused on poetry, songwriting, screen and playwriting, as well as fiction and non-fiction prose works. This year a new program focused on graphic fiction and non fiction has been announced.

From their email promoting the program:

We’re thrilled to announce that in its tradition of being “the first” in all things for young writers, YWW is blazing the trail once more by offering a Graphic Fiction & Non-Fiction workshop. In addition to workshops in fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, songwriting, and play and screenwriting, next summer’s Young Writers can choose to explore the intersection between text and visual art to create their own graphic texts in fiction and non-fiction. Last summer, an extended visit from Visiting Writer and Graphic Text Artist Lydia Conklin, with whom young writers in all genres had the chance to work in this dynamic genre, revealed so much curiosity and enthusiasm for this innovative art form that we’re taking this next bold step in evolving the “Young Writers experience.”

 

And from their website:

In this new innovative workshop writers will create fiction or nonfiction – or both! –by combining their own particular visual and verbal styles. Graphic texts – currently the most popular new mediums for storytelling – will become what participants in this workshop craft to dynamically render their own unique narratives that work on textual as well as visual levels. Instruction will accommodate a wide range of drawing abilities; it’s the story that matters most!

 

For those interested in finding out more, supporting, or applying, you can do so here.