Mission

At The Telling Room, we empower youth through writing and share their voices with the world. As a literary arts education organization focused on young writers ages 6 to 18, we seek to build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real audiences for our students. We believe that the power of creative expression can change our communities and prepare our youth for success both now and in the future.

Vision

A future where youth make themselves heard and their communities value their voices.

Values

Creativity: We engage in writing to spark imagination, foster courage, and cultivate joy in the creative process.

Curiosity: We believe awakening the innate curiosity of youth builds their confidence in learning and engaging with the world.

Voice: We uplift the transformative, powerful voices of youth writers and changemakers.

Justice: We commit to racial and social justice by centering our community's diversity of perspectives, experiences, and identities.

Community: We build a community that is rooted in empathy and inclusion, nurturing an authentic sense of belonging.

What We Do

Our fun, innovative writing and publishing programs support and encourage young people in the art of writing and self-expression. We provide school-based and afterschool writing enrichment programs year-round and statewide, offer professional development for educators, host acclaimed writers to give public readings and work with students, publish bestselling anthologies of student work, and carry out community-wide writing projects and events.

Our skilled staff, volunteers, mentors, interns, ambassadors, and teaching artists—including celebrated writers, artists, and professionals—lend our curriculum the added weight of experience and real-world expertise. And we now look more and more to students and alumni to lend their insights to our work, even as we seek more ways to connect them to the wider world.

We hear time and again that our diverse programs ignite young minds, spark community conversations, and make a positive impact on Maine youth, the adults who teach and care for them, and the community we all share.

Who We Work With

We strive to center and amplify youth voices, underheard voices. We work with students who may be reluctant to write as well as those who already identify themselves as writers, including children and young adults who are part of Maine’s immigrant and refugee communities, LGBTQIA+ youth, youth with emotional and behavioral challenges, students struggling in mainstream classrooms, homeschoolers, incarcerated and other underresourced youth, and passionate young writers who benefit from support beyond what their schools are able to provide. Our core programs are offered for free to students and their families and our evaluation shows that 90% of students report gaining literacy skills and self-confidence as a result of working with The Telling Room.

Our Method

Telling Room students are our fellow writers and artists—and we know that our world is made better by their voices and their literary work. We engage a variety of learning styles and arrive at writing through a variety of avenues. We connect students to the writing process by teaching writing in tandem with another artistic process such as drawing, photography, audio recording, theater, collage, or film. Regardless of where students sit on the writing spectrum, we're ready to meet them there and help them move forward. And we leave plenty of time for sharing. Filling the room with the voices of all students, not just those who raise their hand to share, helps everyone feel included and heard.

History & Highlights

The Telling Room was founded in 2004 by three writers—Sara Corbett, Mike Paterniti, and Susan Conley—who imagined that getting in touch with the youth of Portland and their stories could be like putting your ear to a seashell and hearing the whole ocean. They were right!

Enthusiasm and demand for our programs grew exponentially—The Telling Room now works with over 2,500 young writers each year, reaching students and teachers from over 50 schools and serving more than 100 communities across the state of Maine annually.

Our accomplishments have been recognized with awards and major funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maine Alliance for Arts Education’s Imagination Intensive Communities program, Maine Arts Commission, and the Maine Humanities Council among many others.

In November 2015, our Young Writers & Leaders program won a prestigious National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award as one of the top 12 youth arts and humanities programs in the nation. In 2024, we were awarded the Golden Apple Award by the Maine Education Association.

Since our founding, The Telling Room has connected our students with mentors and acclaimed writers from around the world, including Representative John Lewis, Lily King, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Elizabeth Strout, Kaveh Akbar, Richard Blanco, Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Russo, and George Saunders. In 2021, former President Barack Obama dropped in for a Zoom visit with our Young Writers & Leaders students.

Over the past 16 years, we’ve published nearly 200 books representing a diverse range of youth voices. Telling Room students and titles have won multiple awards—often receiving the highest possible honors—including the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Maine Literary Awards. In 2019, Little Bird’s Flock was inducted into the Library of Congress Center for the Book representing the state of Maine in 2019 as the children's book of the year.

We look forward to seeing what the next tide of young writers and community shapers will bring, and we can’t wait for the next chapter to begin.