Every year, YALDA welcomes a new cohort of 4 students, each working individually with a mentor for 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. 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 are supported to take up this role.
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.
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.
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 well as recordings of writing workshops by visiting writers and YALDA mentors available for teachers and writers to enjoy and share freely.