The Random House, Inc. Creative Writing Contest for NYC High School Seniors

The Mission

The Random House, Inc. Creative Writing Competition recognizes the unique vision and voices of New York City high school seniors with scholarship awards. The Competition further supports student writers throughout the writing process with in-school programs and teacher training.

The History

In 1993, immediately after establishing its world headquarters in NYC, Bertelsmann sought innovative ways to give back to the city that offered such a wealth of creative talent. Among its many philanthropic ventures was the Bertelsmann Foundation's World of Expression Scholarship Program, designed to encourage, support and reward young writers and musicians growing up in this cultural capital.

The program began with scholarship awards for excellence in literary and musical expression and then quickly expanded to include programs that would foster that expression. Fall workshops in public high schools across the city offered a jolt of creativity to high school seniors, jumpstarting students to create original work. Classroom teachers clamored for materials that would help them infuse creative writing into the classroom; World of Expression teaching artists responded with a booklet of lesson plans and staff development workshops for teachers and administrators. A summer writing program for juniors offered an intensive course for developing writers. The World of Expression website provided access to writing and music-related resources for teachers and students year-round.

The Program Today

Now in its fourteenth year and known as the Random House, Inc. Creative Writing Competition, the program awards more than $100,000 in scholarships to public high school students for original poetry, memoir, fiction, drama and graphic novel compositions. It brings together prominent New York City educators, teaching artists, community leaders, authors and industry professionals (including Random House Inc. executives) to inspire, guide, read, judge, and celebrate the work of 1,200 student writers discovering their own unique voices.

Immensely popular writing workshops have continued since 1995 and are held in over 75 public high school classrooms. Appropriately titled the "WRITE NOW!" workshops, teaching artists share their work with students and then lead the class in accessible and fun exercises that produce new writing then and there. The sponsoring classroom teacher receives a four--lesson-plan follow-up to the initial workshop that guides students to further develop and finish a piece for submission to the competition. To inspire the teachers and provide the much needed enthusiasm and confidence many kids need to trust their own voices and write from their hearts, Random House, Inc. offers writing journals and complimentary books for students, as well as class sets of curriculum based books for teachers.

Weekly e-mails offer additional outreach for seniors and teachers who participate in the "WRITE NOW!" workshops. The RHCWC Weekly Writer Web Tips are chock-full of ideas for writing and revising in every genre, as well as ideas for college applications and listings of events, competitions and publishing opportunities for young writers. The Weekly Tips also provide structure and contest deadline reminders for students at every stage of the creative process.

In addition to all of this support for seniors, this past year marked the first year of a summer writer's workshop for select students. participating in the program. This intensive six-day writing course included "majors" in poetry, memoir, drama and fiction and enabled 25 young writers to develop and publish creative work. Led by New York City-based teaching artists, Random House, Inc. executives and authors, students were able to learn about writing from the perspectives of the writer, publisher and educator. Upon completion of the residency, students celebrated their work by reading from their newly published works at an informal luncheon hosted by Random House, Inc.

The Future

Each of the fourteen years the Competition has spent working in NYC public schools has offered further proof of the need for such programs. Young people are hungry for the chance to express themselves, and to learn how to get the thoughts in their minds down on the page. Classroom teachers, often overwhelmed by trying to bring every one of 150 students up to the current standards, are equally hungry for new ideas and support. Administrators are eager for programs that will train teachers to provide opportunities for student-centered student writing and that will keep school culture centered on creativity. Random House staff and authors are eager to share their skills and expertise with staff and students, and welcome the opportunity to learn from them in return.

The Random House, Inc. Creative Writing Competition is devoted to enabling access to these programs, especially for under-represented student populations. As the program for New York City public high school students expands to reach more students--and, in some cases, to reach small groups of students more intensively--projects are in the works to bring these successful programs to other American cities which host Random House operations. In this way, each Random House office can not only be a center of creativity for its employees and authors, it can also bring that same creative force to the schools and communities that surround it.

The Sponsor

Random House, Inc., the world's largest English-language trade book publisher, publishes many of the foremost and most popular fiction and nonfiction authors in hardcover, trade and mass market paperback, audio, electronic, digital, and other formats. Random House, Inc. (www.randomhouse.com) is the U.S. division of Random House, the book division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world's leading media companies.

Books published by Random House, Inc. have won the most major awards of any publishing company, including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Newberry Medal. Among the dozens of Random House, Inc. publishing divisions and imprints in the U.S. are the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, the Crown Publishing Group, the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, the Knopf Publishing Group, Fodor's Travel Guides, Random House Children's Books, the Random House Publishing Group, and the Random House Audio Publishing Group. Random House's publishing companies in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Japan, and Korea are publishing leaders in their territories.

Today's leading authors include Dan Brown, John Grisham, John Irving, Toni Morrison, and John Updike.