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

YALDA provides young 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.

“Yalda” means “birth” in Aramaic and alludes to the Zoroastrian solstice holiday celebrated in Iran and throughout Central Asia 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.

For more about the history of YALDA, here is an interview at the Poetry Society of America.