Serious about improving your craft? SCBWI's regional events provide opportunities for professional growth and help you connect with a supportive, creative community.
SUBMISSION SHINE 2025: ONLINE CRITIQUE INTENSIVE PARTICIPANTS ARE AUTOMATICALLY REGISTERED FOR THIS EVENT!! Webinar Description: Join literary agent and former editor Elise Howard as she discusses the process of working with your agent on readying your work for submission. Topics to be covered will include: · What’s an editorial agent? · Submitting to an editorial agent · Finding the right editorial agent for you · Revising for submission · Ready for submission? · What exactly is “room for the editor”? · The agent’s role after the book is sold. After laying the groundwork for the subject, we will make the session as interactive as possible, in order to answer participants’ most pressing questions about the agent/author relationship and to help make your search for an agent, editorial or otherwise, as productive as possible.
Event Description: So, you have a handful of manuscripts or illustration styles ready to query. Which one should you lead with? Is your other work strong enough to hook an agent if they request to see more? And what will an agent think about the variety of work you bring? Whether you have multiple submission-ready picture book manuscripts, write across age categories, have a variety of illustration pieces and illustrated works, or a combination of all of the above, Submission Shine is an opportunity to talk with one agent about four submission-ready works AND your writing/illustrating career as a whole. Plus, a webinar to help center your understanding of the agent and editor relationships as you begin querying AND additional feedback from a peer critique group of other Submission Shine participants.
Explore excerpts from published middle-grade and young adult novels in verse to examine elements and choices that create powerful impact. Consider ways to make your own poetry come together to make a satisfying and striking overarching story. A limited number of MG/YA Novel in Verse OR PB manuscript/dummy critiques available at an additional cost.
Webinar Description: Whether you are writing an epic fantasy with dynamic world building, a suspenseful thriller, a creepy horror, a dramatic family saga, a charming romance, or an otherworldly adventure, it is important to build characters who are complex and distinct. Each character has a backstory and personality that provides them with dimension, and that character's background should influence how they communicate and connect with others. In this workshop, we'll talk about the different ways we can enhance a character's voice through dialogue and other forms of communication. A limited number of MG & YA critiques are available at an additional cost.
POCONO BELIEVE 2025 PARTICIPANTS ARE AUTOMATICALLY REGISTERED FOR THIS EVENT!! How Imposter Syndrome can affect creators, agents, and even editors at all points in the writing, querying, submissions, and editorial process, and how to battle through it in your own writing and publishing journey. A limited number of PB, MG & YA CRITIQUES available at an additional cost.
The train to publication is all about onboarding. From industry professionals to gatekeepers, and from our readers to ourselves everyone needs to BELIEVE in our work. Whether you're just getting started or you're Published and Listed (PAL), gain steam for the journey at this year's retreat. We'll dig into our work in a way that builds faith in self and makes meaningful connections with others. All aboard!—as we make tracks to the Highlights Foundation.