Challenges

YWP’s hub of inspiration: All our challenges are here!

Weekly

  • Visual Art

    Deadline

    Zodiac

    Draw, paint, sculpt, or photograph your zodiac sign. For an extra challenge, add other birthday-month elements: make your birthstone color prominent, or add a spring setting if you’re a Taurus, etc.

  • Writing

    Deadline

    Recipe

    Write a poem in the form of a recipe: a list of ingredients (in the form of foods or emotions, etc.), then a list of instructions adding those ingredients together to make something new.

  • Writing

    Deadline

    Shoulder

    Your character looks back over their shoulder one last time, wrenching themselves away: a last goodbye. What are they bidding farewell to? Respond in poetry or prose, real or fictional.

Opinion & Commentary

  • Writing

    Resistance

    Resistance is bubbling up in the first weeks of the Trump administration. What are you seeing and thinking?

  • Writing

    Protests Begin

    Americans are starting to rally against the Trump administration in a grassroots effort to build a national movement. Read about it. Write about it.

Great Artists

  • Visual Art

    Bunny Harvey

    Walks in rural Vermont helped inspire these dreamy abstract landscape paintings. 

     

  • Visual Art

    Ted Walsh

    Recipe for a striking painting? Limited color palette, a spare style, and the gorgeous play of light and shadow.

  • Visual Art

    Claude Monet

    How did the Impressionist movement get its name? It started with this painting by Claude Monet and an art critic's insult.

Great Writers

  • Writing

    Toni Morrison

    In Black History Month, we honor Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to be awarded the Nobel laureate in literature, gained worldwide acclaim for her unvarnished exploration of Black identity in America. Have you read her work? 

Online Workshops

Contests

  • Writing

    Deadline

    Human Rights – Writing

    Consider how rights are diminishing for LGBTQ+ people, women, Native Americans, people of color, people with disabilities, and other historically marginalized groups. Write about the impact this has on you, your friends & family, your community.

  • Visual Art

    Deadline

    Human Rights – Visual Art

    How do you celebrate human rights through art? How do you protest their erosion in America today? In photography, painting, sketching, digital art, or another medium of your choice, send a powerful message through your art.

  • Writing

    Deadline

    Democracy & Ethics – Writing

    A democratically elected government might not be enough to uphold the tenets of democracy in America. Can President Abraham Lincoln's vision "of the people, by the people, for the people" be saved? What needs to change to protect democracy?