Mission Statement
Uptown Stories inspires kids to discover and develop their inner voices in a diverse community of writers. Based in upper Manhattan, we offer small-group writing workshops for children ages eight to fifteen, led by master teachers and professional authors. To ensure our workshops are accessible to all children, tuition is pay-what-you-can. Uptown Stories creates an exciting, challenging, and supportive community in which young authors thrive.
Description
Executive Director Kate Reuther founded Uptown Stories as a 501(c)(3), after more than 15 years of teaching English in New York City public and private schools. Our workshops vary in age range and genre, but all of them focus on "real world" writing, rather than school-oriented genres or test prep. In our 2017-18 fiscal year, we offered 32 after-school, weekend, and summer workshops including The Elements of Fiction, The Game of Poetry, POW! Writing and Drawing Comics, Girls Rising, Creating Otherworlds: Fantasy and Science Fiction, What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?, The Power of Words: Political Writing, and Jump Up and Write, a workshop for "active learners" who have trouble sitting still for long stretches of time. At the end of each 10-week semester, we hold a weekend of celebratory readings at the Word Up Community Bookstore in Washington Heights. We invite every student to read a selection of his or her work for family and friends. In addition, each student receives a paperback anthology that includes all of writing and art from that semester. For many of our students, this is their first experience reading their own work in public, particularly in a community setting with their peers. Since 2014, we’ve printed eight paperback anthologies, totaling over 3,000 pages of short stories, poems, essays, screenplays, and comics.
