The Young Writers Nonfiction Project is an annual mentorship initiative pairing emerging writers ages fifteen to twenty-four with experienced editors to help them develop personal essays on war, trauma, or witness. A selection of these essays are then published in a digital magazine, which is free and accessible through this site.
All e-zine contributors are compensated and offered the chance to take part in a live online reading.
The project is made possible by a generous grant from the Ellen Abbott Gilman Trust.
Some of the most important things about a war or conflict never actually make the news.
Violence can empty cities, redraw borders, and scatter families across the world, but it’s limited in how much it can impact the smell of a certain dish, the exact way a grandmother folds dough, or the meal siblings make to feel at home in a place that isn’t home yet. Whatever conflict has taken from you, your family, your community, there’s meaning to what survives at the kitchen table.
We’re looking for personal essays built around food—a dish, a meal, a recipe, an ingredient, a cooking ritual, a food memory that has endured despite how war, conflict, or displacement has touched your life or your family’s.
Why food? A recipe is a kind of archive. Food helps us remember. A smell can carry a home life or period of one’s past inside it. Also, writing toward the table lets you approach big experiences like loss, survival, identity, and belonging without having to narrate the hardest parts head-on. It helps you decide how close to the fire you want to write.
We’re looking for your reflections on what’s hidden in a recipe, carried across a border, tasted on an anniversary no one names aloud. We hope you’ll start with the food, its heat, the hands that made it, and then let those memories open outward. Think about what this dish or that ingredient reveals about your family, your culture, and who you are. What’s been lost, changed, or reinvented: a missing ingredient, a shortcut, a new country’s version of an old dish? And most of all: what has this food experience taught you? An essay can hold grief and joy at once. Celebration and humor have their places in the pages of Consequence just as much as anything else. This project is about remembering how much the ordinary counts. Along with essays, the issue may include photographs and videos depicting food memories.
Remember, you won’t do this alone. Every writer we accept has the opportunity to work with an experienced editor one-on-one, from rough idea to finished essay. You don’t need to be a “good writer” or to have published anything . You just need a story that matters to you and the willingness to work on it. Selected essays are published in our digital magazine, and writers are compensated and featured in a live online reading.
We’ll be sharing excerpts and tips from last year’s contributors. Look for upcoming webinars on creative sparks, getting started and best practices for submitting. The reading period runs from Oct. 15, 2026 to Jan. 15, 2027 with a tentative launch of spring 2027.
We are excited to read your food essays.
Questions? Please contact our Nonfiction Editor at nonfiction@consequenceforum.org
