F136.
It Was the Best/Worst of Times: Launching a Youth Literary Arts Organization in 2020
Friday, March 25, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
The art and activism of young people flourished despite 2020’s political, social justice, civil rights, and health crises. In media res, the BreakBread Literacy Project launched a national youth arts organization: publishing BreakBread Magazine and providing free creative writing classes, events, and literary apprenticeships for creatives age 14–24. Project founders will discuss the ups, downs, lessons learned, and future of a literary organization that seeks to change the face of publishing.
Participants
Jamie Danielle Logan has served as managing editor of the Pinch and Product magazines and now does so at BreakBread. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi and has work located in the New Ohio Review, El Portal, and QuestLog and forthcoming from Palette Poetry and Rougarou.
W. David Hall is CEO and president of the BreakBread Literacy Project. He has directed the Kenyon Young Writers Program for twenty-one years. He teaches high school English in Los Angeles and co-coaches his school's slam poetry team. He has also published Culture and Context, a writing guide.
Cara Echols is an artist and writer and serves as art director for Bread Bread Literacy Project. She enjoys writing experimental and speculative literature and is currently working on her indie magazine CompoSe Art Magazine, as well as a short story collection, which has yet to be formally titled.
Sean Smith, as Charlie J. Eskew, is the writer of two speculative works, Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark (2018), a speculative work of satire, and Judges: Where the Light Lay Still (2018) a prequel to the Judge Dredd series.
Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer and editor. The recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, she is also fiction editor at BreakBread Magazine and a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review. Her short story collection, Township, was published in December 2021.
