Alora Young, who attended the Summer Residential Program in 2019 and studied fiction writing with Jamel Brinkley, has published her first book, Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse, with Hogarth Books.

IYWS ’22 Student Suzette Sheft, who attended the in-person Summer Residential Program this past June, has published a novelistic nonfiction account of her grandmother’s holocaust experience that is getting attention across the world. “It’s not a novel,” Sheft says. “Everything in it is true. I just believe that borrowing the literary and dramatic tools of fiction helps young readers connect with characters and helps stories stay longer in their minds.”