Henry Trinder was the Archive Intern for the Scholastic Awards’ forthcoming anthology celebrating 100 years of teen writing. A current graduate student at Pratt’s School of Information, he additionally works as an archivist with the Academy of American Poets and Jack Hanley Gallery.

Over the past few months, I’ve read a centenary of teen writing. I have read poems, plays, essays, stories, and parodies. I have read about popular kids, bullies, ghosts, hometowns, and parents. I have read about losing your hair to scarlet fever (On Wearing a Wig, 1927), growing up in 1950’s Harlem (Sweet Home, 1963), and being stricken with Infantile Paralysis (Interim, 1946). I have read works by now-famous writers and artists, just as I have read works by future doctors, accountants, and librarians. The great beauty of the Awards, at least to me, was not in their ability to elevate a chosen few to great fame, but in their acknowledgment of all teen and adolescent experiences, as well as their avoidance of the common tendency to generalize our youth into a singular shared background. By presenting so many diverse and eclectic works each and every year, the Awards accurately represent teen life as an idiosyncratic and complex period, not one which can be filtered into a single image or idea.

I am not a teenager, though I suppose I’m not quite an adult either. Halfway through the construction of the anthology, I turned twenty-five. This is a quarter century of time. It is the equivalent of five five-year-olds, or a fifteen and ten-year-old. It means I have grown up, then grown up again. But no matter how I slice it, I often slip into overly narrativizing the past. The years spanning age ten to age twenty are something of a blurry photo I don’t care to look at. But reading these works reminded me how growing up is not simply a journey from A to B. Some time ago, Joan Didion observed how “We tell ourselves stories to live.” Emphasis on stories. Reading years’ worth of teen writing gave me the impression that our earliest years cannot be confined to a single story, but exist as a collection. Just as a book is meant to be opened, we are meant to grow in all directions, with the stories we accumulate along the way stretching out as long branches. These branches intertwine, reach back, go forward. Sometimes they go nowhere, sometimes up, sometimes down, but they always grow, always reaching further out, and always coming from the same roots.

Now that my work on the project is done, I can’t help but revisit many of my favorite pieces. A personal favorite of mine also happens to be one of the shortest. Dating from 1972, it goes like this:

Listen
lying beside you,
i listen with child wonder to your heart
beat.
it is the sound of you inside yourself.

by Nanci Neff, Pittsburgh, PA, 1972

It seems to me that reading and listening are more similar than not. Seeing these works, placed together, reminds me of stories shared between friends and family. This anthology celebrates that act of sharing by giving us the space to listen and be listened to. So now, with child wonder, I read and re-read these stories and poems, and hear the sounds of myself I thought were long since gone. Thank you to the Scholastic Awards Team for trusting me with this project, and of course, happy reading.

The anthology of teen writing curated from a century of the Scholastic Awards will be available in January 2023. Stay tuned to our blog for updates!