The Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance is a volunteer-run, tuition-free mentorship program and publishing platform for young women writers.

YALDA provides young women-identifying writers with the guidance, support, and readership they need to develop and share their work. Led by poet-teachers, YALDA encourages young writers to lead the way in contemporary literature and enrich the cultures of literary education and publishing with their own vision.

YALDA’s mission is set forth by George Eliot in her Prelude to Middlemarch.

MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

• Every year, YALDA welcomes a new cohort of 4 students. Incoming YALDA’s are usually between in their teens and identify as young women interested in poetry and community, creating new language with and of the heart, which is, pursuant of Teresa of Avila’s barefoot metaphor, the seventh true abode of the castle diamond interior of the mind.

• Every new YALDA works individually with a 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 writing, 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” Yaldas have completed their formal mentorship and remain active members of the community for as long as they wish. 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

Chapbooks

Every two or so 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 an 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.

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.

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.

“Yalda” means “birth” in Aramaic and alludes to the Zoroastrian solstice holiday celebrated in Iran as Shab-e-Yalda or "Yalda Night". Friends and family gather to stay up on this longest, darkest night of the year, reading poetry, eating pomegranates, and telling jokes by the fire, and at sunrise celebrate the light that is born of darkness. The day following the solstice traditionally involved a subversion of conventional orders in private and public spheres: teachers became students, for example, in a practice of acknowledging equality and interdependence. So too YALDA's pedagogy honors a mutual and equalizing process of learning whereby the roles of teacher and student are continually shared and free.