Youth Authors come together at conference for students

At Superior Middle School, students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade were invited by their ELA teachers to participate in their first Youth Authors Conference. This conference was set up to allow the students to hear from different local authors about writing styles and how to publish their writings.

The event started with a keynote speaker, Madeline Powers, who is a high school student, but is has been twice published. Her talk focuses on how she gets inspired to write and a glimpse into the process she took to get her books published. Then the students got to have breakout sessions with seven different local authors.

The seven different authors all came from a range of different backgrounds, from newscasting to nonfiction writing to playwriting. During these breakout groups, the authors helped the students learn more about each style of writing as well as getting to practice.

This event was a labor of love by an instructional coach at Superior Middle School, Amanda Lindquist, and Andrew Wolf, from the high school. Both of them worked together over the last few months to make this event possible.

“I know several of the students have already asked, like, how do I get published?” Amanda said. “And so, my hope is that by talking with these different authors, they’ll learn that there’s lots of ways to get published, ranging from getting published in a newspaper to getting published in a magazine to actually publishing a full book. It’ll be an opportunity for students to learn different ways that they can get their work out there.”