Chris Baty
September 30, 2025
I was embarrassingly sweaty at our first meeting.
It was early July, 2025. I was parked on the side of the road, talking with longtime National Novel Writing Month volunteers, former staff, and Young Writers Program teachers.
The big question on the agenda: What could we do about NaNoWriMo?
After a rocky run, the team who’d taken over the organization in 2024 had announced they’d run out of money and were shutting everything down.
Soon, the website that had encouraged millions of writers over the past 26 years would disappear. And NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program, taught in over 10,000 classrooms, would vanish with it.
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