About

The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program is a highly selective, fully online creative writing mentorship for high school students in grades 9–12, including graduating seniors and gap year students. Now in its fourteenth year, it runs June 15 through July 27, 2026 and is open to students worldwide with an internet connection. The program pairs each accepted student with an established writer for six weeks of individualized, informal correspondence focused on the creative processes of drafting, revision, and editing in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. It does not offer academic credit, does not provide a pathway to publication in the journal, and is explicitly not a class — the mentorship model is flexible and correspondence-based rather than structured around formal instruction or a fixed curriculum. Poetry students share new work with their mentor and peers weekly; fiction and creative nonfiction students share work biweekly.

The Adroit Journal itself was founded in 2010 by poet Peter LaBerge, then a high school sophomore, and has grown into a nationally recognized literary quarterly that has published United States Poets Laureate, MacArthur Fellows, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Contributors are regularly recognized by the Best American Series, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Fellowships, and Stanford's Wallace Stegner Fellowships. The mentorship program's alumni record reflects that institutional seriousness: graduates have gone on to receive YoungArts and Presidential Scholar in the Arts designations, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards gold medals, National Student Poets Program recognition, and Foyle Young Poet of the Year honors. The program reports that over 65% of its mentorship graduates have matriculated at Ivy League universities, Stanford, Oxford, or Cambridge.

The 2026 mentor roster includes over 40 established writers drawn from MFA programs, literary journals, and active publishing careers across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The application requires three short essays, a writing sample (four to five poems or eight to twelve pages of prose), an optional transcript, and an optional additional information section. There is no application fee. Tuition is $575 per student; fee remission and need-based financial aid are available for students for whom cost presents a barrier. Critically, financial need information is evaluated entirely separately from admissions — program administrators and application readers have no access to need information until after admission decisions are made, making this a genuinely need-blind process. The application deadline for 2026 was March 1; for future cycles applications typically open in late fall and close March 1.

Admission is highly selective. The program is explicit that it looks for "captivating, compelling potential" — writers with drive, a willingness to engage in discussion and critique, and the discipline to produce new work consistently. Prior publications and awards are welcomed but do not determine outcomes. Students who want to apply to multiple genres may indicate a first and second choice and submit writing samples for each.

The program's position in the catalog is unusual. It is the only entry here run not by a university or a nonprofit institute but by a literary journal — one that publishes working poets and fiction writers alongside the nation's leading established voices. The online format removes geography as a barrier; the need-blind financial aid process addresses cost. For a serious high school writer in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction who wants individualized mentorship from a published writer in a program affiliated with a journal at that level, there is no structural equivalent.