Meet Kelly Knopf-Goldner: The First Director of Teens in Print

Kelly Knopf-Goldner was a high school English teacher who “caught the magazine bug” through her work with Teen Voices, another magazine by and for Boston teens, running from 1988 to 2013. “It was wonderful to see teens writing for a real purpose and getting credit for it,” Kelly says of her time there.

Kelly came to work for WriteBoston almost by accident. She had gone for an informational interview at City Hall, and when she expressed her interest in teaching teens about writing she was immediately shown to the office next door, WriteBoston! At the time, WriteBoston was just two people: Betty Southwick and Amy Lantinga. Kelly was initially hired part-time to be a writing coach and develop the idea for an after-school teen newspaper.

As a writing coach, Kelly spent a couple of days a week helping educators at Boston Community Leadership Academy (BCLA). Having been a teacher herself, Kelly knew that English classes tend to be literature-oriented. This meant teachers expected students to acquire writing skills through assigned essays on reading comprehension. To change this, Kelly helped teachers plan lessons, organized poetry slams, and educated students on career opportunities inherent to writing, just as WriteBoston writing coaches do today. “There are real reasons to write in the world,” she explained to students, “not just to show you’ve read Of Mice and Men.” She encouraged teachers to find their purpose behind every lesson. “Where are you going with reading this book, assigning this project? What should they know by the end of this unit?” These teaching practices are now also shared with Youth Leaders, who learn lesson planning through working with TiPsters after school and over the summer.

When the Boston Globe saw the need for Teens in Print and started funding it, Kelly pitched the program to students she had gotten to know at BCLA. It took a lot of encouragement, even with kids she knew would enjoy writing for publication, because getting to The Globe headquarters on Dorchester Avenue was a bit of a trek. In the wintertime, students would be traveling home in the dark. “Snacks were a big part of the sell,” she says. Little by little, students began signing up and arriving at The Globe in pairs or groups of friends.

“It’s funny when you tell kids they can write whatever they want,” Kelly says. “Some don’t believe you. Some are overwhelmed.” She recalls students coming up with massive topics, such as racism, bullying, and dating, and strong opinions about these topics. Students come into TiP with the same big ideas and opinions today. Teens in Print started in the Boston Globe, a space of traditional journalism where the writer’s opinions on an issue are traditionally excluded. Kelly switched this around and allowed students to begin with big ideas and opinions, then branch out to find facts that supported their opinions, and finally to tailor that big idea into an angle that they could more easily research. She calls this process “backing into journalism.”

An early example Kelly recalls is a student who came into the program intending to write about racism. She advised them to get to this topic through a story or a specific experience. Through brainstorming exercises, this student found themselves writing about buttons on backpacks memorializing victims of gun violence, and how many buttons depicted Black and brown teens. “If you tell the story of these buttons, that will lead you to the larger topic,” Kelly said. The student then addressed racism through these symbols of grief and remembrance in their article.

In 2004, the first Summer Journalism Institute was something of a mad rush to create. Marie Franklin told WriteBoston that there was a September 1st deadline to print the next edition of Teens in Print, for which Kelly realized they would need to create content over the summer. WriteBoston had done a one-week summer program the year before, just to generate interest, but producing this amount of work would require a lot more students.

“So, we hustled!” She says, “We did this massive recruitment effort, in the middle schools too, to get the rising 9th graders involved.” This resulted in a large span of ages, from eighth graders to twelfth graders, 12-year-olds to 18-year-olds.

The students then needed subjects to write about, which created the need for field trips. Kelly recalls taking students to Fenway Park, Harbor Islands, and Mayor Menino’s office, because “he was very hands-on with Teens in Print.” 

In the first year, the program was unpaid and operated as a summer camp. Kelly realized this meant that WriteBoston was competing against summer job opportunities, many of which are offered by the City of Boston. For all the following summers, all students were paid $15 per hour for their work during the six weeks of SJI through the City of Boston’s Successlink program.

“It was all part of learning the landscape of teen programming.” She says. While WriteBoston was piloting the partnership with Successlink and starting to pay students, Kelly created a ladder system that rewarded returning students by having them mentor new students. She also found internships for long-time TiPsters at Zumix and the Boston Architectural School, which they could do and be paid for alongside SJI.

What Kelly aspired to teach students through Teens in Print was the ability to write to express themselves and to inform others, instead of writing only to demonstrate understanding of a school subject. “When kids first started writing with us, they wrote in a stilted English-class way.” She encouraged students to lean into their passions and to always ask questions and be skeptical. When students struggled to find topics to write about, she remembers having them complete this exercise: “Write down three things you’re passionate about. Three things you’re angry about. Three things your friends and family are talking about.” This same brainstorming activity is still done at the beginning of every after-school cycle to prepare new TiPsters to write their first articles.

Kelly left WriteBoston 2022 and is currently a content strategist for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Technical Services and Security, which means she writes and edits website pages for Mass.gov. She finds herself using teaching skills from Teens in Print when she asks adults working at other state agencies, “Who is the audience for this page?” and “Can you clarify your main idea?” Of her time at Teens in Print, she says, “It was very fun and very special for me, who has been a teacher, to work with teens in a different mode.”