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About Tennessee Young Writers

Humanities Tennessee presents to Tennessee's young people four programs that promote and nurture the love of reading and writing:

Tennessee Young Writers read from their work at the 2004 Southern Festival of Books

The Letters about Literature contest encourages students in grades 4–12 to read a book and write a letter to the author about how the book impacted their lives. Close to 1,000 students from across the state submitted letters to the contest in 2009.

The Tennessee Young Writers' Workshop is a weeklong writing workshop for students who have completed grades 7–12. The instructors, published authors, are skilled writing teachers. The students all share a love of writing and desire to develop their craft that cannot be found in a regular classroom. Many students return for another year at the workshop because it makes such an impact on their lives. In the words of one student, "The workshop absolutely changed my life."

Young Adult Reader Day brings the Southern Festival of Books to middle and high school children in the host city. This underserved and often overlooked segment of the reading population attends sessions with authors prior to the Festival.

The Statewide High School Reading Initiative began as an effort to promote a one state/one book program for teenagers. In 2007, Humanities Tennessee invited students from across the state to request free copies of Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos, and the program distributed more than 3,000 copies of the book. In September of that year, Mr. Gantos presented to approximately 200 high school students in the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library and to nearly 900 Memphis students in the Holiday Inn at the University of Memphis about the book and his experiences that led to the book. He returned to Tennessee again in October to present to more than 1,000 Nashville students at War Memorial Auditorium. Many teachers were able to incorporate this book into their lessons and one Memphis school even created an entire six weeks of study around the book and used it to inspire students to write their own memoirs.

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