Looking ahead to YoungArts in Miami, welcoming my students

This year the National YoungArts Foundation received some 10,000 applications for its extraordinary program celebrating emerging artists in the visual, literary, and performing arts fields.  The teen finalists—152 of them—are now just a few weeks away from participating in YoungArts Week in Miami, a program designed to celebrate their talents, to extend their reach, and to engage them in conversation and exercises that will hopefully shape their way of seeing and doing for years to come.

As the Master Teacher for the 24 young writers who were selected for the program (writing being just one of nine celebrated disciplines), I am blessed.  I'll be teaching in the city's botanical gardens.  I'll be asking the students to come prepared with a brief autobiography of their hair, a declaration about the books that have changed their perception of both story and language, and a photograph of themselves that firmly divides a Before from an After.  We'll explore the garden in search of telling details, weatherscapes, and invisible, essential forces.  We will write bird song and water rush.  We will assimilate and empathize.

I am eager to meet the young writers. I am eager to learn from the program's other master teachers and presenters—Marisa Tomei, Bobby McFerrin, Bill T. Jones, Debbie Allen, Joshua Bell, and Adrian Grenier, among others.  I am eager to spend some time in Miami.

But first things first.  Today I officially welcome my students, who will be arriving from San Francisco, Birmingham, Holladay, Boonton, and all manner of places in between.

Congratulations, and welcome:

Alexa Derman

Julia Hogan

Flannery James

Libbie Katsev

Lois Carlisle

Allison Cooke

Stefania Gomez

Peter Laberge

Amy Mattox

Kathleen Radigan

Laura Rashley

Lila Thulin

Victoria White

Catherine Wong

Kathleen Cole

Amanda Crist

Emily Hittner-Cunningham

Anne Hucks

Natalie Landers

Annyston Pennington

Anne Malin Ringwalt

Lizza Rodriguez

Frances Saux

Ashley Zhou