Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts

Photograph courtesy The Young Writers Project

Watch a video of the Prize presentation event

produced by Media Factory

A Tribute to Geoffrey Gevalt by Vermont author Stephen P. Kiernan

For a few years after the turn of this century, the Burlington Free Press newsroom found a new entertainment. The managing editor and an investigative reporter would hold a meeting in the editor’s office, a small, glass walled square, in which they shouted.

The door was closed, but it made no difference. Everyone could hear the two men bellowing. It was a side-splitter, how the two differed at top volume about whatever project was in the works, while pacing and making dramatic arm motions. Reporters, photographers and city editors would ring the newsroom with their laughter.

One of those people in the office was me. The other is the winner of this year’s Herb Lockwood Prize. And yet Todd invited me to speak, uncensored. Revenge time.

In retrospect, I think the editor and I were both frustrated by the newspaper industry’s decay, and especially its loss of nerve. We needed to find some other occupation that had meaning for us.

For that editor, he created something entirely new. Over the past 20 years it has enriched the lives of more than 100,000 children and teachers, benefitting the minds of uncountable adults too.

His radical idea was that young people possess vast resources of creativity that are interesting, insightful, and instructive. He believed that young writers would learn more about self-expression and mutual support if they were writing for an audience of peers, rather than merely to satisfy a teacher’s red pen.

If you think these ideas are anything less than exceptional, go watch the kids down at Burlington’s skateboarding park. Criticized for riding all over the city, as a nuisance, hazard and noise, those kids now do impossible things routinely, stunts that could cause adults to break their arms simply by watching. This man’s idea was similar, but instead of tricks on boards he focused on young people’s self-expression in words.

He launched the idea within the Free Press, but its shrinking space for news corralled the project too tightly. The Vermont Business Roundtable, led back then by Lisa Ventriss, believed in the idea enough to fund the project for two years. That meant this editor needed to leave his long career in news, illustrious and award-bedecked as it had been, in Massachusetts, Ohio and Vermont. He must create a new business, and find a path to financial stability inside of 24 months.

The editor established the Young Writers Project, with a website that continuously received students’ poems and stories and rants. The young people were free to respond, cheer and teach. The best of them appeared in newspapers across the state. Financial strength came via foundations, parents and donors, in part because the editor possesses a clever genius.

For example, the project began to publish an annual anthology, best of the best. When the poems and stories had all been chosen, the editor had new board members call the children to tell them they were going to be in a book. Great moment for the kids, for their parents, for their schools, for the board members. Devotion results.

Each week the editor would offer a prompt to trigger the writers’ imaginations. They responded by the hundreds. Once, his cue was Earnest Hemingway’s shortest story, only six words long: For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Used. The young writers replied with more than 2,200 six-word submissions.

All of it happened online, like an early version of social media, only useful. The writers gave each other feedback, criticism or support. Quiet kids found their voices. Tough kids showed their vulnerabilities. Leaders emerged, as did followings. The writers themselves policed content and behavior, unaware that the editor was always watching. The writers, all with an attitude of originality, were the ones to outlaw coarse language. One unfortunate morning, a high school student committed suicide. The editor monitored reactions – heartbroken, perplexed, grieving together – all day long. At one point he called the boy’s parents to make sure it was OK; he would shut the discussion down if they wished. The parents said they were reading every word.

The project bloomed. Teachers learned that students were skipping homework … to write. The editor built a program for classrooms to have their own private writers’ project. Working with St. Michael’s College, he created a graduate school level class that taught teachers how to teach writing online, using the workshop model. The numbers of writers soared. So did Vermont kids’ performance on standardized tests. Experience in the project became a common college application essay topic – not just about writing, but about respectful dialogue and the power of thoughtful self-expression. Some young writers came back later as interns. The earliest participants are now in their late 30s, and it’s plausible that two generations from the same family have written within the project.

The editor experimented: a young playwrights project, some of it performed by professionals. A songwriting project, complete with a concert. A photo project that continues to this day, expanded to include other visual arts. He included all sorts of allies: musician Pete Sutherland, poet Reuben Jackson, a physician in St. Albans.

Often, when he wanted to try something new, the editor would put out a plea to the software writing world for the code to make it possible. Every time, someone stepped forward. People were watching the project all over the world.

When his creation was matured and stable, he retired. The project is in its 20th year. But the editor’s ideas of creating community through writing were not finished. He held writing workshops for people in jail. He ran a workshop for people recovering from addiction to opiates. He joined other online communities, particularly one whose form was one photo, with an essay or story to explain its meaning. In all venues, his ethics were the same: mutual respect, gentle criticism, strong support. In his conduct, he exemplified how young writers might behave too.

He is still at it. Today he is the managing editor for two small weekly papers – one in Hinesburg, Vermont, one in Santa Cruz, California – keeping them afloat and strong for no salary. It appears the man is not capable of stopping.

The Herb Lockwood Prize has two fundamental measurements: performing an art form at a higher level, and building a community in that art form. First, with the Young Writers Project, he created a new art form. Second, the foundation he built continues to teach kids a way to express themselves, to find their voice, how empowering it is to have an interested and respectful audience. This former editor created much more than a website. He has built a true forum, a legacy from which writers and readers can benefit for generations to come.

The former reporter who argued in that little office is here to say that heartfelt praise is the best revenge. With pride, I am delighted to announce the winner of the 2026 Herb Lockwood Prize, Geoffrey Gevalt.

2026 Winner

Geoffrey Gevalt