Creative Writing

National YoungArts Foundation was established in 1981 with the mission "to identify and support the next generation of artists and to contribute to the cultural vitality of the nation by investing in the artistic development of talented young artists in the visual, literary, and performing arts." High school students from across the nation compete in nine arts categories for the opportunity to attend the YoungArts week in Miami, Fla., where they work with some of the top artists in their fields and further compete for significant scholarships to be awarded later in the spring. This year the Fine Arts Center was well represented in the YoungArts competition. Sophomore Adina Lasser and senior Hayden DeBruler were both awarded Honorable Mentions in Poetry, a distinction which comes with a $150 cash award. Senior Kathleen Cole was a Finalist in Fiction and traveled to Miami to attend the program in the second week of January. While there, she read her award-winning flash fiction piece to an audience of distinguished artists, writers and patrons of the arts. 
Earlier this fall, Kathleen also traveled to Princeton University, where she was one of three high school students to attend the Princeton young artists weekend. She toured the school and sat in on some creative writing classes. 
Closer to home, the February issue of TOWN Magazine features work by two Fine Arts Center students as a part of their look at literature in the upstate. Hayden DeBruler's poem, "A Drink," and Adina Lasser's poem, "The Eleventh Wife," are both included.
The Fine Arts Center's online magazine, Crashtest, debuted a new issue at the end of January. Featuring high school age writers from England, China and Kentucky (among other locales), this issue also includes 10 new prose poems by Mathias Svalina, co-editor of Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine, whose first collection of poems, Destruction Myths, was published by Cleveland State University Press in 2010.