Hudson Valley Writers Ctr Receives Grant to Benefit Local Youth

The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center (HVWC) has received a $10,000 grant from the St. Faith’s House Foundation to provide writing workshops for children at the RSHM Life Center in Sleepy Hollow, the Mt. Kisco Boys and Girls Club, and Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry. Writing workshops will also be continued at Nepperhan Community Center in Yonkers.

Last year, the Writers’ Center created several multi-session writing workshops in Sleepy Hollow’s RSHM Life Center and at Yonker’s Nepperhan Community Center, both serving predominantly minority, low-income, and underserved youth. This year, the Center has expanded the program at RSHM Life Center, has started a workshop for teens at Mt. Kisco Boys and Girls Club and will soon begin workshops for teens at Children’s Village.

RSHM Life Center Executive Director, Sister Susan Gardella, praised the intimate and nurturing environment of the fiction/memoir and poetry workshops taught by two HVWC instructors as uniquely powerful to these students and that they were made to feel safe and supported. Students were encouraged to stop thinking of creative writing and literature itself as formal and inaccessible, but as something approachable and fun.

At the Boys & Girls Club of Northern Westchester, serving mostly black and Latino, and economically disadvantaged youth from Mt. Kisco and surrounding communities, the Writers’ Center instructor is holding one-hour workshops designed for around ten teenagers from eighth through tenth grades.

For the Children’s Village, the workshops will serve teenage residents of the residential school for at-risk boys. Many of these students will present their own set of demands on the instructor with behavioral and emotional challenges resulting from feelings of loss, abandonment, educational failure and resulting anger. Creating confidence through honest expression of true memories and experiences can be transformative for these at-risk youth.

The HVWC is a non-profit organization that advances the art and craft of writing by encouraging writers and readers to enjoy the literary arts. It offers a variety of educational programs for professionals and aspiring writers, presents festivals and public readings by well-known and emerging authors, and brings literary and educational programs to a diverse community. The HVWC also publishes literary works under the imprint of Slapering Hol Press. Named from the Old Dutch for Sleepy Hollow, the Press was established in 1990 to publish poetry by emerging poets and anthologies.