Meet Our Grantee-Partner: WriteGirl
Mission: To promote creativity and self-expression to empower girls and gender-expansive youth within a community of women writers.
WriteGirl envisions a world where all teens live, write, and speak boldly as they become inspiring, transformative leaders, driven to effect positive change in their communities.
While living in New York City, poet, songwriter, and freelance writer Keren Taylor helped lead poetry writing workshops for girls. She noticed the workshops’ transformative impact and wanted to continue combining her love of writing with community work after she moved to Los Angeles. She contacted local writers’ groups and formed an initial leadership team of about 10 women to launch WriteGirl in December 2001.
WriteGirl is an award-winning creative writing and mentoring organization that helps girls and gender-expansive youth ages 13 to 18 discover and express their creative voices. Its workshops, mentoring, and publishing opportunities seek to help teens develop creative writing and communication skills and build self-confidence. WriteGirl serves more than 1,000 youth annually in the Los Angeles area and beyond, including internationally. Now in its 23rd season, WriteGirl has maintained a 100% success rate in helping participants not only graduate high school but enroll in college.
WriteGirl mentor and mentee at a WriteGirl Fiction
Workshop
WriteGirl’s programs and opportunities are offered at no cost to participants. More than 400 professional writer volunteers guide teens to explore poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, fantasy, songwriting, screenwriting, journalism, and more. WriteGirl’s curriculum and positive feedback approach support writing as a means of creativity, expression, and healing. Each writing workshop includes a “Soapbox” segment during which teens are encouraged to share anything on their minds. With a supportive community cheering them on, they learn that their ideas matter—in their family, community, and the world.
“WriteGirl is an ecosystem of people helping you. I learned that if I continue to trust myself and believe in the power of my pen, this writing will take me many places.”
– Kai Adia, WriteGirl alum, poet, author, and publisher
WriteGirl also gives teens the opportunity to become published writers before they even graduate from high school. To date, WriteGirl has published 38 award-winning anthologies showcasing youth writing and recently launched the online literary journal, Lines & Breaks.
During the past two years, WriteGirl has expanded programming beyond the Los Angeles area to provide workshops and mentoring for teen girls in Uganda and Cameroon; teens from 18 other countries and across the United States have attended WriteGirl online workshops. WriteGirl also works with boys and co-ed groups under the name “Bold Ink Writers,” which brings creative writing workshops and mentors to youth who are incarcerated or system-involved.
“WriteGirl has been pivotal for me since the start. From the moment in which I entered the doors of my first WriteGirl workshop, I felt so loved and so supported. WriteGirl support is so much more than just writing or poetry or lyricism or songwriting, it's about really supporting all of their mentees in whatever they want to achieve.”
– Amanda Gorman, Inaugural Poet and WriteGirl Alum
WriteGirl received a Poetry Programs, Partnerships, and Innovation grant from the Poetry Foundation in fall 2023. The grant has enabled WriteGirl to add two poetry workshops to its annual schedule, including an in-person workshop at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. The workshops feature interactive writing activities, self-grounding segments, and small-group writing sessions. Special guest poets share poetry techniques and insights into their creative processes. Recent guests have included Alise Alousi, WriteGirl Alum and presidential inauguration poet, Amanda Gorman; Ashaki Jackson, Princess Daazhraii Johnson, Darby Price, and Los Angeles Poet Laureate and Poetry Foundation trustee, Lynne Thompson. The workshops culminate in a “Poetry Café'' where teens and alums share what they’ve written that day. The grant has also allowed WriteGirl to publish a “Poetry Adventures” edition of the WriteGirl Planet, a digital writing activity zine for WriteGirl members.
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