The hooded sweatshirt was pulled up over Alma Castrejon’s head as she entered her first WriteGirl workshop. To the women mentors in the room, the hood may have signaled defiance or lack of interest. To Alma, it was a protection against the unknown. “I remember the first meeting. I was very shy, and I was in a room full of complete strangers,” she recalls.

Allison Deegan, WriteGirl Associate Director, remembers Alma’s first day quite vividly also. “She stuck by her friends, didn't say much about anything and didn't want to offer any details about herself,” Allison says.

Alma was eager to write and had learned about WriteGirl through founder Keren Taylor’s “recruitment” at the Para Los Ninos youth center in downtown Los Angeles. When she walked into WriteGirl she was one of the pioneering mentees. Like many WriteGirls, her experiences with the organization influenced her personality and her attendance in college.

Three years later, Alma is now a university sophomore. “I plan to continue my studies after my bachelor’s and specialize in the political relations of Japan with Mexico. I also plan to do some work with the United Nations,” she says from an apartment outside the University of California-Riverside, where she is working toward a degree in international relations and a minor in Japanese.

Getting into college was a little easier for Alma when her mentor helped her with her personal statement for college. However, that is just one of the ways Alma says WriteGirl has shaped who she is today. Some WriteGirls also created a film project that the girls worked on. “I learned a lot about communication and working with cameras,” she says of the film project. She also notes that WriteGirl and the project helped her gain more discipline because she was accountable for her work on the project, even though it was something she was doing for fun. 

But the help with college admissions and making a film were just bonuses for Alma. She originally joined WriteGirl for the writing, and that is what helped her most.

Many of the pieces of writing Alma created while in WriteGirl were political in nature. WriteGirl gave her one of the few outlets to discuss her political interests throughout high school. Her poems often discussed Mexican revolutionaries that she read about on her own. One of these poems, “I am From,” was featured in the first WriteGirl anthology, Threads and brings back fond memories for Alma.

Happily, she recalls the first time she read “I am From” to an audience of strangers. It was the first time she had ever read one of her poems aloud. She was alone, all eyes were on her, as she nervously began reading her poem at the Knitting Factory. The smiles of the audience prodded her on. “I was nervous as I read, but in the end, when everyone clapped, I felt awesome.”

“WriteGirl has allowed me ‘to get out of my shell,’” she says. “That experience really allowed me to be open and less shy.” Sharing her writing gave her confidence she hadn’t had before.

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