Girls Write Now’s curriculum and services have evolved over the past 20 years to include the full range of writing for different stages of life throughout high school, to college, career and beyond. Writing today means multi-genre, multimedia, multi-platform communication—everything from storytelling to coding. Our mentees are defining the digital age, bringing the craft of writing into the 21st century.
Writing 360 is our yearlong intensive mentoring program, matching underserved high school girls/ gender non-conforming youth with women professional writers for a one-to-one mentorship, structured around creative, critical, and digital skill-based programming and services. Mentees create at the intersection of language, technology, and art, exploring sub-genres within poetry, fiction, memoir, journalism and screen/playwriting, and learning digital skills such as audio and video editing, coding, and design.
Mentoring pairs attend monthly genre and media-based workshops, led by expert teaching artists. There, mentees draft original pieces and build their portfolios throughout the year. Workshops are a jumping off point for the weekly pair sessions where mentors guide mentees through the process of editing and polishing drafts into final products for submission to contests, publications and presentations, including in Girls Write Now’s annual anthologies, and our popular reading & multimedia series, Girls Write Now Live.
Mentees also participate in Girls Write Now’s Writing Works programming, where they receive unique and personalized professional development, strengthening their writing and communication skills, and opening doors, on the pathway to college and career.
Writing 360 means caring for the whole writer and real relationships. The dedicated Girls Write Now team—including the mental health professionals who serve as Wellness Advisors—take this seriously with wraparound services and customized support for each mentor, mentee, and pair, day in and day out, with a passionate community backing them up and extending their reach.