Shaping the Future: Highlights from The Muse Youth Program 2024

The holidays are a time of reflection, when one can look back on the year’s accomplishments and see the full scope of growth, reach, and change. 2024 was a vibrant year for the Muse Youth Program. Our programming brought creative writing education and personal development to over five hundred students from five of the seven cities in Hampton Roads. Thanks to community support, The Muse offered 42 free creative writing exploration classes on Saturdays, ensuring no financial barrier to the expressive arts for children between the ages of 8-18. The 2024 teen fellows were the first teen fellowship cohort to attend the Christopher Newport University writing conference, and one of our fiction writers even placed in the CNU writing Contest. Watching each fellow receive their graduation certificates was a bittersweet moment, and having seven of them return to our classroom to continue their creative writing journey has been heartwarming.

The summer was especially busy for youth. Writing camps filled our community center with elementary and middle school students exploring comics, game writing, fiction, poetry, and songwriting. Our youth education team traveled to local libraries, military bases, and teen halfway houses to teach creative writing craft, mechanics, and social-emotional skills. Our summer internship program, By Teens For Teens, created the third volume of our teen zine, Musings: Retrograde, and the launch party had the biggest turnout we have seen for our Zine celebration. Twenty Tidewater adolescents had their prose, poetry, and art featured in Retrograde, a student project designed and edited by our four editorial interns. Youth education is a direct investment into our community’s growth and future, and because of our youth program’s success, we believe the future is bright.