New Lit on the Block :: San Francisco Youth Anthology
Publishing quarterly online, the San Francisco Youth Anthology offers middle-school, high-school, and college-aged writers and readers of any age a platform for all genres of creative writing. Based in San Francisco, the publication only accepts submissions from San Francisco and the surrounding areas, but they are open to readers from around the globe.
As Editor Ava Rosoff explains, “SFYA began with the desire to start a magazine and initiative for young writers to help them showcase their work in an anthology, captured in the ‘Youth Anthology’ part of the name.” She and her editor peers saw SFYA as “a way to foster a community of youth writers in the San Francisco Bay Area and encourage young writers to share their work with the greater community.”
Joining Ava on the masthead for SFYA are Founder and Editor Natalie Checherina, a high school junior and avid writer hailing from San Francisco; Editor and Outreach Team Member Stella Hong, a high school junior who is passionate about creative writing, journalism, and media coverage; and Editor Angelina Costa, a high school junior in San Francisco who serves as Finance Director for Youth for San Francisco, a youth-led non-profit organization, and is a writer for the publication, The Daily Dragon. Ava, a high school junior, is passionate about creative writing, particularly poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Her work has been published on The Ellipsis website, in GRL Mag, and in Palest Blue literary magazine. She is also a photographer for her school’s newspaper, The Lowell, and the vice president of her school’s literary magazine, The Junkyard. Taylor Waggoner has also just joined the staff as Editor and Outreach Team Member.
For writers interested in submitting works to SFYA, Ava explains that “all submissions are all funneled into a shared drive available for all editors to see, and all editors read them. We provide feedback by leaving comments on the documents that are submitted, and the response time is within a month.”
SFYA readers can expect to find innovative works of creative writing from burgeoning middle school, high school, and college students in the Bay Area. Thus far, the publication features work from the editors while they solicit submissions for upcoming issues.
As Ava tells shares, “It was pretty hard to get submissions when submissions opened, but now with more people on our team, we have slowly been receiving more submissions, which is exciting! Since we’re a relatively new publication, having only started in October of 2022, we’ve struggled with raising awareness about our publication, experimenting with using Instagram as an advertising platform, reaching out to middle schools and high schools, and hanging up physical flyers around the SF Bay Area. Our outreach has been effective, as we have received many submissions and we have started to read through them as a team.”
On this upswing, the SFYA staff look forward to the publication’s future, “We hope to grow our magazine by getting more submissions and eventually printing issues. We also hope to have in-person events with local writers in the form of writing workshops and hosting writing workshops for young writers to share their work and receive constructive feedback.”
