Lighthouse is pleased to announce our first-ever YA Fest, a weekend by and for YA writers! The weekend festival, held over March 16-17, is for writers of Middle Grade (MG), Young Adult (YA), and New Adult (NA) fiction. It hosts craft seminars, business panels, community events, and networking with your fellow writers. Whether you're totally new to writing YA or are three books in, this weekend is meant for you.
Check out the headers below for a full guide to the weekend!
I
ntensives
In the mornings, you have the option to take a two-day-long intensive course. These intensives, run concurrently with the morning seminar session, are meant to dig deeper into the particulars of your story alongside writers working on the same topic. The Art of Getting Started and Plot Points Roadmap are our two featured intensives at the Fest.
Craft Seminars
Both days of YA Fest have an abundance of craft seminars to choose from. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, if you aren’t in a writing intensive, you’ll take Writing Young Love and Making Your YA Characters Pop. In the afternoon, you can pick between three different focus areas, such as revision or multi-POV novels. Check out all the craft seminar options here.
Business Panels
After lunch each day, there will be a one-hour panel focused on a business topic. Saturday's publishing-focused panel will consider the particulars of publishing in the YA/MG/NA genres, and on Sunday, YA and MG authors will duke it out over which genre is best (or, really, amicably discuss the differences).
Community Events
In the evenings, join us for an array of social activities designed to help participants get to know the YA community of Denver and beyond! Saturday, speed-date your potential future critique partners to find your next best writing buddy. Then, on Sunday, join us for a reading and conversation with local published authors Leslie Vedder and Jenny Elder-Moke. They’ll share stories of how they conceived of their books, wrote them, and got them into the world.
We can’t wait to see you there!
Have questions? Reach out to [email protected].
