Do you love history, historical fiction, or just plain storytelling? Then join us for an an exciting week of delving into Iowa’s history! We’ll learn about forgotten Iowans, write stories imagining life in the past, and take plenty of field trips. One day we’ll be opening “discovery trunks” at the Old Capitol Museum to get a rare peek at artifacts and treasures from the past. Another day we’ll head to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History to get a first hand look at long-lost animals. Get ready for some serious time travel, fun, and of course, writing!

Do you love Harry Potter or wish you could be a wizard? Then sign up for our magic-filled summer camp, Word Wizardry! We’ll make our own wands, write spells, create potion recipes, and even have a Horcrux  scavenger hunt. Find out if you belong in Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin through our Sorting Ceremony, and then work hard to earn the House Cup for your house! Prepare your witch hats and brooms
because we are going to turn words into magic!

Do you love stories about strange monsters and brave heroes? About dangerous quests and magical treasure? Then join this fun week-long camp where we’ll read myths from all over the world, create our own heroes,  and discover legends in our own backyards. Campers will be introduced to traditional stories from every continent and learn a little bit about the different cultures they belong to. Activities will include following the classic “Hero’s Journey,” making our own monsters, heroes, and treasure, and then writing adventures that combine them all. This would be a great camp for anyone who loves Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series.

Erin McInerney is a senior English major at the University of Iowa. She has studied creative writing and literary analysis, as well as book design and the fundamentals of editing and publishing. She has been a volunteer  with the IYWP since the summer of 2017, is an IYWP administrative Intern for the 2017-2018 academic year, and has a lot of experience working with kids.

Are you a writer with an interest in exploring theatre and performance? In this two-day workshop, we'll explore new ways to tell our own stories through a fusion of poetry, music, and movement. Following in the tradition of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls...”, we’ll work together as an ensemble to chart the path of a choreopoem from inspiration and ideas to the page and from the page to the stage. 

The writer Patrick Ness has described Young Adult fiction as finding boundaries and crossing them, as figuring out, when you end, “who you are and what shape you are." As young adults yourselves, what better time to explore writing about young adult lives and concerns, and who—at this point in your life—you are?

We’ll delve into YA writing, looking at what it is and how it works from diverse perspectives. We’ll explore teen lives in television and movies and discuss patterns such as coming-of-age, dystopia, romance, and identity. We’ll play improv games, and mine our own high school experiences in conversations and writing activities. We’ll eavesdrop in coffee shops and head outdoors to imagine action scenes at the end of the world. By the end of the week, you’ll leave with the first chapter and outline for your own YA novel.

This camp will meet at the Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn Street, Iowa City. M, T, W, F: Meeting Room D; Th: Meeting Room E

Create a life mission statement. We’ll write about what brings us alive as learners on this planet and create a personal statement that can help to guide us through decisions about what classes to take, where and how  we want to learn, what to do after high school, and how to organize a college experience. Once we have honed our statements, we’ll print them on posters, tshirts, and maybe even some public walls!

Author Jennifer New leads the written inquiry + local artist and teacher Dan Peterson leads the print making. This class is a combined effort of Iowa Youth Writing Project and PS1.

Here’s one for visual artists who write short stories, poets who paint, or any teen who’s into combining words and visual elements. We’ll find inspiration for writing by looking at artwork and make visual art inspired by literature.  We will collaborate with local writers and artists to explore poetry, verbal and visual collage, monoprints, poetry broadsides, and whatever synthesis of images and words you find interesting.

The Imaged Word is a special partnership between the Iowa City Press Coop and the IYWP.

Welcome to the wonderful world of comics! Want to write comic books or superheroes? How about graphic novels? Manga? Zines? Political cartoons? The comic medium has it all. Here, you'll learn all about the medium and how to write your very own stories within the medium. Artists are welcome, too!

We'll discuss and explore all the different elements of the medium, such as style, panel placement, speech bubbles and font, color/shading, ect, and how to combine and balance these elements, with you, the author or artist, using these elements in your own stories and creations.

This camp will meet at the Iowa City Public Library, 123 S. Linn Street, Iowa City. M, T, W, F: Meeting Room D; Th: Meeting Room E

Break up with writer’s block for good using a tried-and-tested approach of language games, constructive constraints, and unusual writing prompts. Drawing from the techniques dreamed up by the Surrealists and the Oulipo movement, students will reconnect with their own creativity and draw on the wellspring of their peers via different forms of collaborative writing. Additionally, students will engage with and write about a selection of curated art, music, and objects with the hope of making the familiar strange—and the strange familiar. Later in the week, students will also engage in a “guerrilla writing” component where poems will be disseminated into the world through a variety of non-traditional mediums.