This book describes a specific program for teaching and mentoring expressive writing by at-risk youth—a program that can generate transformative change in the teens, and generate significant new satisfactions for you. When young people write personally and creatively, it helps them to overcome challenges in their lives. They feel better, think more clearly, are more self-confident, and are better able to relate to others, including their helpers. This personal creative process is enriching and enlivening for everyone. It brings emotional clarity and meaning to everyone. It brings closeness, in addition to learning and growth.Welcome to the Pongo Teen Writing Method.

Allow yourself to be enchanted in this magical story of Sophy, the young girl whose extraordinary adventure with a real wolf helps her discover her inner confidence. Sophy is a shy girl who struggles to fit in in the outside world. She is happiest at home, playing in her wolf suit in her den. It makes her feel strong like a wolf, fierce like a wolf, and maybe even a little bit brave like a wolf. She loves her suit so much she decides to wear it to school one day, but it doesn't go well. She tries to talk at school but the words get stuck in her throat and everyone laughs and whispers behind her back. But one day, an extraordinary thing happens… Sophy is whisked away to a magical snowy land where she meets a wolf and her cub. The unlikely trio roll, run and howl together, playing happily in the snow. Sophy has found friends and nothing can ruin her day… until a big, angry bear appears. But Sophyfinally finds her voiceand finds the courage she's been looking for all along. This beautifully told and enchantingly illustrated story carries important themes of overcoming the isolating feeling of being shy, finding friends and most importantly, finding your voice, and will delight readers young and old. Praise for Jo Loring-Fisher's other books: Taking Time (Lantana Publishing) ‘A soothing balm in book form’ – The Observer Picture Book Review ‘Children from around the world marvel at small wonders of nature in this dreamy story in verse.’ – The Bookseller Maisie's Scrapbook (Lantana Publishing) – Winner of the Northern Lights Book Award

Focusing on adolescent multilingual writing, this text problematizes the traditional boundaries between academic writing in school contexts and self-initiated writing outside of the formal learning environment. By reconceptualizing the nature of adolescent multilingual writing, the author establishes it as an interdisciplinary genre and a key area of inquiry for research and pedagogy. Organized into six chapters, Reconceptualizing the Writing Practices of Multilingual Youth provides an in-depth examination of the writing practices of multilingual youth from sociocultural and social practice perspectives. Drawing on first-hand research conducted with young people, the text questions the traditional dichotomy between academic writing and non-formal equivalents and proposes a symbiotic approach to exploring and cultivating the connections between in- and out-of-school literate lives. By highlighting a bidirectional relationship between formal and informal writing, the text advocates for writing instruction that helps adolescents use writing for entertainment, identity construction, creative expression, personal well-being, and civic engagement, as well as helps them learn to navigate future literacies that we cannot imagine or predict now. This much-needed text will provide researchers and graduate students with a principled overview and synthesis of adolescent multilingual writing research that is significant yet underexplored in applied linguistics, TESOL, and literacy studies.

Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people’s multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people’s literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.

The official NaNoWriMo handbook that inspires young people to tackle audacious goals and complete their creative projects. Includes pep talks from today's biggest authors! John Green, Marissa Meyer, Jennifer Niven, Daniel José Older, Danielle Paige, Celia C. Pérez, and Scott Westerfeld with an introduction by Jason Reynolds! Partly a how-to guide on the nitty-gritty of writing, partly a collection of inspiration to set (and meet) ambitious goals, Brave the Page is the go-to resource for middle-grade writers. Narrated in a fun, refreshingly kid-friendly voice, it champions NaNoWriMo's central mission that everyone's stories deserve to be told. The volume includes chapters on character, plot, setting, and the like; motivating essays from popular authors; advice on how to commit to your goals; a detailed plan for writing a novel or story in a month; and more! National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that believes in the transformational power of creativity. They provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds--on and off the page. With its first event in 1999, the organization's programs now include National Novel Writing Month in November, Camp NaNoWriMo, the Young Writers Program, Come Write In, and the "Now What?" Months.

A lawyer for the Big Bad Wolf earnestly pleads his clients innocence in court. Mother Earth and Father Sky give birth to a rebellious child whose fiery temper threatens to destroy the world. A teenage boy discovers the complexities of fame after his bands first album skyrockets to the top of the charts. Tornado warnings turn a young girls routine babysitting job into a fight for survival. These are just a few of the imaginative, daring, and thought-provoking stories found in these pages. Also included are dozens of poems and personal essays exploring everything from travel to friendship, love to loss, fear to hope. What makes this book truly unique is it was written entirely by kids and teenagers. Dancing with the Pen features the work of more than sixty young writers in elementary school, middle school and high school. These authors come from all across the United States, from California to New York, from Kentucky to Michigan, as well as from abroad: Singapore, Canada, New Zealand. However, the themes and situations they explore transcend hometowns, backgrounds and cultures they are familiar to us all. Dancing with the Pen is a book for young writers and young readers and the young at heart. Even if you are not normally a voracious reader, this book is still for you. Every piece within these covers is written by someone who understands what it is like to be a young person today. Maybe you will recognize yourself in these pages. Perhaps you will even be inspired to pick up a pen, step out on the dance floor, and go for a whirl yourself.

When You Hear Me (You Hear Us) is an anthology of poetry and personal stories centering the voices of those directly impacted by the incarceration of young people in the United States. Compiled by Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop, this rich collection includes firsthand accounts from both the young people charged and incarcerated in the adult criminal legal system and from the community at large: the mothers, the loved ones, the correctional staff, public defenders, prosecutors, and others harmed and left with unhealed trauma. These critical voices, uniquely combined, illustrate the ecosystem that surrounds youth who are incarcerated--and expose the ripple effects that touch us all. This book challenges us to hear these voices calling out for accountability, transformative justice, and healing. Together, they demonstrate the collective impact of the prison system, and our collective responsibility to create a society where every one of us can thrive.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities. Over the past twenty years, amateur fanfiction writers have published an astonishing amount of fiction in online repositories. More than 1.5 million enthusiastic fanfiction writers—primarily young people in their teens and twenties—have contributed nearly seven million stories and more than 176 million reviews to a single online site, Fanfiction.net. In this book, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis provide an in-depth examination of fanfiction writers and fanfiction repositories, finding that these sites are not shallow agglomerations and regurgitations of pop culture but rather online spaces for sophisticated and informal learning. Through their participation in online fanfiction communities, young people find ways to support and learn from one another. Aragon and Davis term this novel system of interactive advice and instruction distributed mentoring, and describe its seven attributes, each of which is supported by an aspect of networked technologies: aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability, asynchronicity, and affect. Employing an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, they provide an in-depth ethnography, reporting on a nine-month study of three fanfiction sites, and offer a quantitative analysis of lexical diversity in the 61.5 billion words on the Fanfiction.net site. Going beyond fandom, Aragon and Davis consider how distributed mentoring could improve not only other online learning platforms but also formal writing instruction in schools.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends comes the “equal parts intoxicating and dazzling” (Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Gilded Wolves) first book in a captivating new duology following an ill-matched pair of spies posing as a married couple to investigate a series of brutal murders in 1930s Shanghai. It’s 1931 in Shanghai, and the stage is set for a new decade of intrigue. Four years ago, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death, but the strange experiment that saved her also stopped her from sleeping and aging—and allows her to heal from any wound. In short, Rosalind cannot die. Now, desperate for redemption for her traitorous past, she uses her abilities as an assassin for her country. Code name: Fortune. But when the Japanese Imperial Army begins its invasion march, Rosalind’s mission pivots. A series of murders is causing unrest in Shanghai, and the Japanese are under suspicion. Rosalind’s new orders are to infiltrate foreign society and identify the culprits behind the terror plot before more of her people are killed. To reduce suspicion, however, she must pose as the wife of another Nationalist spy, Orion Hong, and though Rosalind finds Orion’s cavalier attitude and playboy demeanor infuriating, she is willing to work with him for the greater good. But Orion has an agenda of his own, and Rosalind has secrets that she wants to keep buried. As they both attempt to unravel the conspiracy, the two spies soon find that there are deeper and more horrifying layers to this mystery than they ever imagined.