At VCFA, our faculty members are the beating heart of our program. Recently we were privileged to sign on a brilliant addition to an already star-studded faculty: author and illustrator extraordinaire Matt Phelan! Matt Phelan first joined VCFA as a Visiting Writer, and joined the faculty shortly afterward. Today we’ll hear about his first semester […]
The world of kidlit is a beautiful, many-faceted place, filled with beauty both whimsical and dark. Few authors can inhabit all areas of that beautiful world like Nora Shalaway Carpenter. A graduate of VCFA’s Writing For Children and Young Adults Program, proud Appalachian author, and a multiple-time graduate assistant, Nora’s work spans many genres and […]
Many writers (if not all writers at one time or another) secretly dream of having a book become a bestseller. In reality, only a handful of books of the thousands published each year become bestsellers. For your book to land on the New York Times Bestseller List, you have to sell around 10,000 copies, usually […]
At VCFA, the Writing for Children and Young Adults program is famed for its ability to open doors in the world of kidlit. For Kelly Dyksterhouse and Callie C. Miller, an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults opened two different doors which led to two different paths: those of literary agent and author, […]
Bath Spa Residency is BACK! Originally developed to offer students the opportunity to explore the literature and culture of England while broadening their understanding of our two separate cultural approaches to writing for young readers, the Oxford/Bath Spa Residency is a popular residency option open to 17 students and alumnx each summer. Packed with excursions […]
It has been said that writing for children is an exploration of liminal spaces: the gateways between early childhood and adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, and, beyond age group and into genre, between reality, fantasy, science fiction, and other creative liminal spaces ripe for exploration. If there’s one author who is unafraid to venture into the […]
As the national conversation turns toward AI and the unrelenting, onward march of technology, AI writing tools like ChatGPT are at the forefront of the list of concerns writers have about publishing in the time of artificial intelligence. To offer insight and advice (and a pretty delicious toast recipe) we’ve looked to an author who […]
As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “Music is the universal language of mankind.” It has been compared to breath, to life, and is generally understood as something mankind simply cannot be without. In celebration of this universal language and amazing women who contribute to it, VCFA alums Ashley Walker and Maureen Charles combined forces […]
Hello! I’m Kate Pentecost (aka Ceredwyn Bagley, the Program Assistant for the Writing for Children and Young Adults Program) and I’m excited to introduce our Publishing Crash Course blog series. This blog series, which will have multiple, detailed installments, is meant to help demystify the process for alumnx and current students preparing to begin their […]
If there’s anything the past few years has taught us, it’s that stress is something that can no longer be pushed aside and ignored or accepted as simply part of being human. In her newest nonfiction book, Dealing With Stress, author, artist, mental health advocate, and VCFA alumnx Christi Cognevich tackles the topic of dealing […]