Projects and Collaborations
Write Out in Chorus: Voices Old and New
Spring 2025
Write Out celebrated its fifth anniversary of programming by assembling a special five-year anthology. The chapbook features creative student work from all five years of Write Out programming as well as reflections and creative responses from several of our facilitators inspired by their work with the program. To accompany the anthology, students created a fun and vibrant modular art display and crafted their own broadsides using lines from writing featured across the anthology. Copies of the broadsides were printed so students and their families could take home and celebrate student work from across Write Out programming, while the originals were bound into a one-of-a-kind artbook. As part of this process, Write Out partnered with Teens with a Movie Camera; Syracuse teenagers helped document the construction of the artbook’s pages and produced a video highlighting the project’s joyful and collaborative creative experience.
Family Pictures Syracuse
Fall 2023
Write Out partnered with Syracuse’s Turning the Lens Collective to hold workshops inspired by their missions to archive and tell stories through family pictures. Our Peer Mentors worked hard on pieces that were performed at the Everson Museum of Art during the Collective’s weekend-long, Family Pictures Syracuse launch event in October 2023.
Words on the Move!
Spring 2023
Words on the Move is a youth-curated interactive art display of student writing modeled after refrigerator poetry magnets. To create the display, each student from Girls Inc., North Side Learning Center, and La Casita picked out a favorite line of their own writing which was then turned into a large magnet. The modular display encourages viewers to combine, recombine, and rearrange the students’ lines to create new poems and stories. Words on the Move was part of the 2022-23 Art Joven/ Young Art exhibit, which recognizes the talent and achievements of local youth in arts education programs at La Casita.
Ecologies of Writing
Fall 2022
Write Out students gathered once a week after school at the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) where they had the entire museum to themselves to participate in special programming. Students from Girls Inc. and North Side Learning Center had the opportunity to explore the museum exhibits, engage in enthusiastic and inquisitive play with science, and write pieces that directly responded to questions about science, ecology, and the environment that we asked them to consider as we investigated our surroundings. At the end of the semester, Write Out students participated in a community writing workshop hosted in collaboration with the Central New York Environmental Storytelling Series featuring award-winning poet Vievee Francis. Write Out students were able to talk to Francis about her work while using it to produce their own poems exploring and expanding on many of the ecological concepts students considered during weekly programming at the MOST.
The Environmental Storytelling Series
2022-2023
From the ESS site: “Coordinated by SU’s Engaged Humanities Network and SUNY ESF's Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications Program, this annual series of events, programs, and courses brings together scholars, teachers, students, artists and community leaders to deepen our understandings of and strengthen our responses to the impacts of the climate crisis on Central New York and interconnected ecosystems around the world. The series utilizes the best of scientific expertise, artistic expression, and humanistic interpretation in pursuit of mutual understanding and collective action.”
“It includes public forums, courses, and community-based arts and humanities programs coordinated around readings, talks, and screenings by Indigenous and Black environmental storytellers.”
Write Out helped create writing prompts, learning guides, and more for the ESS during the 2022–2023 academic year.