Marietta College and Morgan High School will host major interscholastic creative writing tournaments on March 9, 2019. Teams of writers representing grades 7 through 12 from public, private and parochial schools in Southeast Ohio and Northern West Virginia are invited to attend the tournaments, according to officials from United Fellowship of The Pen (UFP), Ohio’s Interscholastic League for Adolescents & Young Adults.
The all-day Saturday tournaments are part of a broader regional constellation of events that UFP stages annually from January through March each year to identify and showcase Ohio’s best young writers. Fifty percent of the top young writers who compete in the 2019 PenOhio Regional Championship Series, of which the Southeast Regionals are a part, will be invited to move on to compete in the 2019 PenOhio State Finals in April.
Marietta College will host students in grades 9 through 12 on March 9th, while Morgan High School will host students in grades 7 and 8.
“The United Fellowship of The Pen Board of Trustees is deeply committed to recognizing the outstanding young talent who reside in Southeast Ohio,” said Erika Pfeiffer, President of UFP. “To encourage participation at PenOhio’s Southeast Regionals, our Board has granted a 50 percent grant to cover half of the membership dues of schools who compete at Marietta College and Morgan High School.”
Schools will receive the grant automatically upon registration for the PenOhio, Pfeiffer said. Registration is open online at penohio.org now through December 31.
UFP is Ohio’s largest supplemental creative writing program, having served 278 schools in 2018. The program features an eight-week fall writing workshop administered online. Its curriculum philosophy, anchored in the Ohio Department of Education English Language Arts Writing Standards, emphasizes Praise, Inspiration, and Rewards for young writers, and assessment based on holistic rubrics.
UFP, a national 501c3 educational non-profit organization, heaped Praise, Inspiration, and Rewards on more than 2,000 of Ohio’s young writers at PenOhio tournaments last season.