Hello friends! It’s that time of year again. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to figure out the best and safest ways to put on our conference this year, and we’re so grateful for your patience and enthusiasm as we waited to see what 2021 had in store.
We are pleased to announce that Chapter One Conference will be held this July 31st as a hybrid event with both online-only and in-person options for attendance!
We are aware of the ongoing risks that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to those who are not yet or cannot be vaccinated for a number of reasons. We also learned throughout our experience last year how to best expand the conference to be accessible to those who can’t leave home or travel to Chicago, and moving forward we’re committed to making a virtual attendance option available for all our future events. All this being said, we are still very eager to create safe, in-person opportunities for young writers to meet, network, and collaborate.
Ch1Con was created as a way to bring a vibrant online community of young writers out into the IRL space for a weekend of togetherness, eye-contact, and awkward geekery. Ch1Con itself has in the past been a chance for our team, which is scattered all across the country, to hug each other after a whole year of long-distance friendship. For this reason, we’re doing our best to bring an in-person component back to the event for those who are vaccinated or willing to mask and social-distance.
Here are some details about how this will work.
The in-person component of the conference will be held at our regular venue, the Hilton Garden Inn of Chicago/O’Hare. In addition to following hotel guidelines, attendees will be asked to show proof of vaccination before entering our event space without a mask. Masks will be required for all attendees who are not fully vaccinated for whatever reason. If you register for in-person Ch1Con 2021 attendance but cannot attend in person for whatever reason, you will have the option to transition your admission to online by contacting us here.
As for online attendees, we will also be opening a discord forum that will allow attendees to chat, share their work, and collaborate on writing exercises. Our speakers will take questions and encourage participation from those online and off, and we will all do our best to make you feel as if everyone’s physically together. We are looking to have a combination of both online and in-person speakers (veteran Ch1Events attendees have lots of experience with remote speakers at our in-person events) but we are allowing speakers the same flexibility to shift to remote attendance as needed.
Speaking of speakers…we are SO excited to announce that our Keynote speaker for 2021 is none other than young author and future feature filmmaker, Camryn Garrett!
Camryn has been a friend of the conference for some time now and we are so excited to finally be able to have her join us for a keynote address, as well as our Ask Us Anything panel. For those of you who might not know, Camryn Garrett is a longstanding member of the young writers community on social media, and is the author of two novels published by Random House Children’s. Full Disclosure, which was released in 2019, and Off the Record, which was released in 2021, are both incredible stories and we encourage you to check them out if you haven’t already.
We are so thrilled to be able to share this news and open registration for you all today!
Attendance is available to any young writers who will be between the ages of 11 and 20 as of July 25th, 2020. (If you’ll be between the ages of 21 and 29, check out the Chapter Twenty-One Conference!)
Register now at our New Attendee Online rate of $50* (lunch not included)!
Ch1Con ONLINE Youth Registration Link
Ch1Con ONLINE 18-20 Registration Link
Ch21Con ONLINE Registration Link
You can also register at our New Attendee In- Person Rate of $70*
Ch1Con IN-PERSON Youth Registration Link
Ch1Con IN-PERSON18-20 Registration Link
Ch21Con IN-PERSON Registration Link
*if you are a past attendee of Ch1Con you are eligible for a discounted rate. You should have received an email to this effect, but if you did not please contact us here.
Finally, to address some of our common FAQs…
Interested in who this year’s other speakers will be? Keep an eye on the blog, because we’ll be announcing the speakers very soon! (And, as usual, registered attendees will get a sneak peek via e-mail!)
Curious what’s going on with Ch1Camp this year? Once again, updates on that are soon to come. We have some very exciting plans for free online events in the works.
As usual, spots are limited to attend the conference, so make sure to register before they’re gone!
If you can’t make it to the conference but still want to support us, we have a Patreon now!
We’re so excited for the 2021 conference (and hope you are too)! See you (virtually or in person) in July!
— The Ch1Events Team
Emma Rose Ryan is an undergraduate studying Creative Writing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She’s been a member of the Chapter One Young Writers Conference team since the event’s inception, and she was honored to take on the role of Director in 2017. Emma writes middle-grade and YA fiction, focusing on paranormal and urban fantasy genres. When she’s not writing, Emma can be found reciting Shakespeare, watching The West Wing, or petting someone else’s cat.
Julia Byers is the president of nonprofit Chapter One Events, founder of the Chapter One Young Writers Conference, and founder and director of the Chapter Twenty-One Conference. She spends her days as an assistant for a children’s literary agency, her early mornings doing nonprofit work, her evenings writing, and her weekends as a freelance photographer (sometimes not in that order). She is a graduate of the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she received Highest Honors in Honors Creative Writing & Literature and minored in Global Media Studies (Film), as well as the Columbia Publishing Course UK, an intensive publishing certificate program organized in collaboration between Columbia University and Exeter College, Oxford University. Her writing has received a variety of honors, including First Place in the Children’s/Young Adult Fiction category of the 82nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, a Hopwood Award, and the Arthur Miller Award. In her free time, Julia enjoys watching too many movies, doing outdoorsy things like jogging and hiking, and pretending she has free time. She lives in New York City.
Francesca Zappia lives in Indiana and graduated from the University of Indianapolis with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, cooking, or playing video games. She was chosen as the 2017 Emerging Author at the Indiana Authors Awards, and her second novel, Eliza and Her Monsters, was chosen as a Kirkus Best Teen Book of 2017, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and was among the Top 10 of the YALSA 2018 Best Fiction for Young Adults list.
Riley Redgate is the author of Seven Ways We Lie, Final Draft, and Noteworthy, which was named a Best Teen Book of 2017 by Kirkus and the New York Public Library. She grew up in North Carolina, majored in economics at Kenyon College, and now lives in Chicago. She has also written for The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. You can find her on Instagram @rileyredgate and Tumblr @batmansymbol.
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