young writers – Chapter 21 Conference

2019 Panelist: Gretchen Fredericksen!

April 29, 2019April 28, 2019 by Julia Byers, posted in 2019 Conference

The Chapter Twenty-One Conference team is extraordinarily excited to announce our next speaker for the 2019 Chapter Twenty-One Conference: Sales Strategy Coordinator for Macmillan Publishers, Gretchen Fredericksen!

Gretchen Fredericksen is from a small town in New England with a population roughly equivalent to the number of windows on the Empire State Building (hint: it’s 6,500). She earned a BA and MA in English from Boston College and currently works as a Sales Strategy Coordinator at Macmillan Publishers where free books are plentiful and fangirling is highly encouraged. When she’s not talking about them at work, Gretchen enjoys reading more books at home, on the subway, anywhere she can find a green space in the concrete jungle, and even during quiet moments in the Soprano section of rehearsals with the Cecilia Chorus of New York.

Gretchen will be speaking on the young publishing panel at Ch21Con, in which young publishing professionals will discuss the non-writing side of the industry.

Find Gretchen online:

Interested in attending one of our young writers’ conferences on June 29 in Des Plaines, IL (a suburb of Chicago)? You can learn more at:

We’ve got lots of other amazing speakers to announce as well in the lead-up to the 2019 conferences, so keep an eye on our websites and social media for more speaker announcements coming your way soon!!

– The Ch21Con Team

2018 Competition Anthology: Available Now!

July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 by Julia Byers, posted in Online Events

We are pleased to announce that the e-book anthology of our 2018 writing contest’s winning entries is now available!

Perseverance cover — Look at this gorgeous cover!

You can now purchase Perseverance: Chapter One Events Writing Competition Collection, Second Edition from a number of e-book retailers, including Amazon and Blurb. It’ll also be available through Barnes & noble and iBooks, shortly. And in order to make the anthology accessible to as many readers as possible, for a limited time we’re pricing it at only $0.99! Hurray!

We absolutely love the poems and short stories that won our 2018 writing contest, and we hope you will love them too. Happy reading!

– The Ch1Events Team

2018 Writing Contest Winners!

July 10, 2018July 11, 2018 by Julia Byers, posted in Online Events

Hey, everyone!

We are thrilled today to announce the winners of our second annual Chapter One Events Poetry & Short Fiction Contest! All winning entries will appear in our 2018 contest e-book anthology, which will be available for purchase in mid-July.

You’ll note in the contest results below that we don’t necessarily award a full set of winners for each category. This is because we believe in rewarding quality over quantity, so we’ve limited our winners to only those entries we find fitting of this distinction. (Basically this means, if you won something, it’s because we really love you.)

Now, without further ado: drum roll please………

Ch1Con (Ages 11-20)

Poetry Winners

First Place: “Visions” by Miranda Sun
Second Place: “Mountain” by Emily Woods
Honorable Mentions: “Away with You” by Miranda Sun and “Looking Forward to Nineteen” by Emily Woods

Short Fiction Winners

First Place: “The Rosewyvern’s Curse” by Emily Woods
Second Place: “We’ve Hit an Iceberg” by Kori Johnson

Ch21Con (Ages 21-29)

Short Fiction Winner

First Place: “The New Corpse” by H. L. Cassel

Congratulations!!!

Thank you to all who entered the contest! We really enjoyed reading your entries and we hope you’ll enter again next year. And a HUGE congratulations to our winners!! All our winners this year will receive discounted admission to the relevant conference, as well as one free copy of the 2018 contest e-book anthology–which, again, will be available for purchase in mid-July.

Now go celebrate!

–The Ch1Events Team

2018 Moderators: Emma Rose Ryan and Julia Byers

April 10, 2018April 9, 2018 by Julia Byers, posted in 2018 Conference

Surprise! Today’s announcement is actually for two speakers. (Whaaat?!)

The Chapter One Events team is pleased to announce our next two speakers for the 2018 Chapter One Young Writers Conference and inaugural Chapter Twenty-One Conference: Ch1Con director Emma Rose Ryan and Ch21Con director Julia Byers!

Emma Ryan

Emma Rose Ryan is an undergraduate studying Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s been a member of the Chapter One Young Writers Conference team since the event’s inception, and she is honored to be taking over as director for 2018. Emma writes middle grade and YA fiction, focusing on paranormal and urban fantasy genres. When she’s not writing, Emma can be found reciting Shakespeare, watching The West Wing, or petting someone else’s cat.

Find Emma online:

Twitter

Julia Byers

Julia Byers graduated in 2016 from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she studied Honors Creative Writing & Literature and Global Media Studies (Film). She graduated with Distinction and Highest Honors. She then attended the inaugural Columbia Publishing Course UK, a one-month intensive certificate course focused on the publishing industry, run in collaboration by Columbia University and Exeter College, Oxford University. In 2017, she moved to New York City to complete a six-month editorial internship at Scholastic. In her free time, she directs bookish nonprofit organization Chapter One Events and is a writer and amateur photographer. Her writing has received a variety of honors, including a Hopwood Award, the Arthur Miller Award, and first place in the children’s/YA fiction category of the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition.

Find Julia online:

Check out Julia’s published writing on her website.

Emma and Julia will be co-moderating the conferences’ combined ask anything panel. Julia will also be moderating Ch21Con’s young publishing panel. In honor of speaking at the conferences, Julia is thrilled to give away a critique of the first fifty pages of one young adult or middle grade manuscript!

Just click the link below to enter the raffle. We’ll leave it open for one week!

Click here to enter the giveaway!

We don’t have all of our speakers for the 2018 conferences solidified yet, but we’re announcing those we can throughout this week. Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the reveal of another 2018 speaker!

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– The Ch1Events Team