Gunn High School freshman Keshav Dhir has founded the literary website Scribere, which publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry by young authors.
While Keshav Dhir’s young classmates were fantasizing about growing up to become astronauts and basketball players, he was dreaming of a less lucrative career: writing.
Keshav has always loved to read and to write — mostly sci-fi and fantasy (his favorite book is “Harry Potter”) — and several years ago submitted a piece to a children’s publishing company. He never got a confirmation that his work was received, and an outdated website included no way to contact the publisher. “I was kind of discouraged,” the Palo Alto teen, now 14, said in an interview at the Mitchell Park Library on Wednesday. “I felt like someone had put a stopper on my creative flow.” So the well-spoken Gunn High School freshman created his own solution: a free online literary journal that aims to be responsive, accessible and respectful, with the ultimate goal of encouraging more young people to express themselves through writing.
The journal, dubbed Scribere (which means “to write” in Latin), publishes four times a year and takes fiction, nonfiction and poetry submissions from youth ages 11 to 18 years old. Authors must adhere to word counts and submit age-appropriate work that hasn’t been published elsewhere, not even at school, but the process is otherwise open. As soon as a person submits a piece of writing, he or she receives a confirmation message, and within a month, the writer will get another notification that the piece will be published or needs further work.
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