The Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance operates as a mentorship program and publishing platform for young women writers.

The Young Artists Language & Devotion Alliance (YALDA) provides young women writers with the guidance, support, and readership they need to develop and share their work. Led by poet-teachers, YALDA’s platform empowers innovative young writers to shape contemporary literature and enrich the cultures of literary education and publishing.

MISSION

We believe that some of our country's most exciting artists are women under the age of 21. Not only can they innovate in literature but their active presence in the conversation can also enrich the cultures of literary education and publishing. Young women deserve and need a space where they can work together outside the pressure cooker of an academic environment that so often restricts their creative vision. Given the guidance, support and readership they deserve as authors, and a platform that offers them the same respect and freedom of expression given to adult writers, young women can make valuable and vital contributions to literary culture at-large. To create that community of support, in a spirit of friendship and dedication-- that's YALDA's mission. It is also the mission and wish set forth by George Eliot in her Prelude to Middlemarch.

The name "Yalda" means "birth" and alludes to ancient Zoroastrian winter solstice holiday, Shab-e-Yalda ("Yalda Night"), when friends and family gather and stay up on the longest, darkest night of the year, making a purifying fire and reading poetry, celebrating at sunrise the light that is born of darkness. The following day also traditionally involved a subversion of conventional orders, private and public-- servants became masters and and visa versa-- in a practice of acknowledging equality and interdependence. So, too, YALDA's pedagogy honors the mutual and equalizing process of learning whereby the roles of teacher and student are continually developed and shared. 

MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

Incoming YALDAs

Every year, YALDA welcomes a new cohort of 4 students. Incoming YALDA’s are usually between the ages of 13-19 and identify as young women interested in poetry and community, creating new language with and of the heart, which is the true sweet home diamond castle of the mind.

Every new YALDA works individually with a poet mentor for 1-2 years. New YALDAs meet online once a month with their mentor to write and read and talk together in support of their writing, with an emphasis in the first year on generating and developing their poetry, and the second year in shaping and collecting a longer body of work to be published by YALDA as a chapbook.

In addition to monthly meetings with their mentor, every new YALDA participates in seasonal online workshops with the YALDA collective. Seasonal workshops are once each fall, winter, spring and summer. Fall, winter and spring workshops are day-long workshops; the summer workshop is 3 days long. Our workshops are customarily led by Visiting Writers and YALDA mentors.

Ongoing YALDA (2 years-no limit)

Ongoing Yaldas have completed their formal mentorship and remain active members of the community. In addition to attending the seasonal workshops, ongoing Yaldas have the opportunity to become more involved with YALDA leadership and support roles such as managing and editing our annual online publication; web editing, design and development; social media management; programming and communication support.

Each ongoing Yalda is invited to serve at least one year in one of these roles and to teach one summer workshop of their own design. Long-term, ongoing and active YALDAs interested in becoming mentors will be supported by Farnoosh Fathi to take up this role.

PUBLISHING INITIATIVE

Annual Publication 

In addition to our print chapbooks, which are digitized in our archives, we publish work online each May in our annual YALDA May Nosegay. The publication shares writing by our collective, which consists of the YALDA cohort, YALDA mentors, ongoing YALDAs and visiting writers.

Chapbooks

Every few years we publish the chapbooks of the cohort graduating from their mentorship program; YALDAs are seminal in every step of the chapbook publication process and receive a letterpress apprenticeship in which they learn to design, print and bind their own chapbooks. The apprenticeship, and the celebratory launch reading that follows, are held in New York City.

Our letterpress apprenticeship and chapbook publication program are made by possible by our partnership with Ugly Duckling Presse. UDP is a Brooklyn-based, nonprofit publisher of poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts and books by artists. UDP favors emerging, international, and "forgotten" writers, with over 200 titles published to date; and their books, chapbooks, artist books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain letterpress and other handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking. 

At the moment, YALDA’s small, volunteer-led program by invitation only as it operates organically, slowly and intimately.

Archives

One way YALDA endeavors to share out from our program to a wider audience is through our archives. Our archives include past issues of our spring publication, digitized print chapbooks, as wells as recordings of writing workshops by visiting writers and YALDA mentors available for teachers and writers to enjoy and share freely.