Cultural Daily has always had a mission to showcase works from new writers—both writers who are in the early stages of their careers and writers who haven’t had much publications. One of the groups that have been a focus for us are teen writers and we’ve managed to publish hundreds of young people through collaborations with their students.

This week, we are starting a series called “Heart Beets,” a project that follows a group of high school students throughout their ‘24–’25 school year. Consider it a scrapbook, a journal, of their poetry, stories, essays, journals, photos, rants and anything else that give the readers glimpses into their day to day and week to week.

There will be new entries each week—mostly one, but flexible enough for more pieces if necessary. They’ll not only write beautiful things, which they already do, but learn how to pace the overall when there are more than a dozen writers contributing to it, how to tell an ongoing story through mixed genres and forms, how to make each individual voice be heard while not drowning out the others.

To culminate the projects, all the work they’ve contributed to the “Heart Beets” project will be gathered into a manuscript and Cultural Daily will work with them in publishing it as a physical, collaboratively authored anthology.

It’s a unique project, one we haven’t done before, and our hope is that this project is the start of what we believe will be amazing writing careers from each and every one of these talented young writers.

The writers in this project who met at CSSSA 2024, the “Beets”, are: Annie Bryant, Jiyoo Kim-Jung, Nico Deany, Navya Chitlur, Leah An, Lila Coen, Livia Ferrario, Milla Jans, Semi Jung, Lila Kessler, Ariel Zhang, Amelia Yuan, Elsa Han, Jiyun Woo.

We look forward to this incredible year-long journey. We hope you will follow us.