LIVE Your Story, Your Voice: A Writing Workshop

Join Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real About Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America editor AMY REED and contributors AMBER SMITH and IW GREGORIO in a writing workshop to explore how to find your own “voice” as a writer. Each author will speak about their journey and then guide participants through a writing exercise to uncover your own voice. Workshop will conclude with a participant discussion and an opportunity to share your writing.  A great opportunity to explore writing in an authentic voice for young adults, parents of young adults, aspiring YA writers, and marginalized communities.

Conversations

Saturday, 5/15 – Part 1 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Four Years On
Sunday, 5/16 –  Part 2 – Our Stories, Our Voices: Writing As Activism

AMY REED is the award-winning author of several novels for young adults, including The Nowhere Girls, The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World, Beautiful, Clean, and Crazy. Her newest book, the psychological thriller Tell Me My Name,  is a near-future, gender-swapped retelling of The Great Gatsby. Amy is a feminist, mother, and Virgo who enjoys running, making lists, and wandering around the mountains of western North Carolina where she lives.
Author Website

AMBER SMITH is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult novels The Way I Used to Be, The Last to Let Go, and Something Like Gravity. An advocate for increased awareness of gendered violence, as well as LGBTQ equality, she writes in the hope that her books can help to foster change and spark dialogue surrounding these issues. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her wife and their ever-growing family of rescued dogs and cats. 
Author Website

IW GREGORIO is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. She is author of This is My Brain in Love, which was awarded the 2020 Schneider Family Book Award by the American Library Association. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above, which was a Lambda Literary Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, and an ALA Rainbow List selection. She is proud to be a board member of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Her essays have been published in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Scientific American, among others.
Author Website

This event is sponsored by: