Last Week of Young Adult: The College Essay and Personal Statement. Thanks, @JOWinNYC !

We are in our 6th and final week of @CWPFairfeld young adult literacy labs. The teacher institute came to a culmination last Thursday, we've already hosted over 100 kids in varying genre writing camps and now we are leading several upperclassmen through the college essay process and other personal writing.

Last year, we had tremendous success with Jason Odell Williams' Personal Statement as a starting point to get the college-geared writers sparked with innovation and possibility. This year, we decided to buy each of our writers a copy of the text as the teachers guide the personal statements the students compose.

With Ali Laturnau and Amanda Morgan at the helm, the youth are guaranteed to have a killer essay. Yesterday, too, we had special guest Ellen Israel do her powerful magic with introducing strategies for composing a killer piece of writing. Last year, she guided tremendous text for our Power of Words anthology and we're expecting much of the same this year. The one on one attention each writer gets is amazing and I feel fortunate to have such a remarkable team in the classroom with them.

The added bonus? A call scheduled by the author himself later this week. It is the CWP trifecta: powerful teachers, a great author, and devoted young writers. Here's to the week.