Fresh Voices: Composition at Cal Poly

An annual collection of student writing, Fresh Voices features dozens of essays across several different genres commonly taught in our composition program, all written by Cal Poly students who completed our two-course FYCP sequence in the previous academic year.

True to Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy, all Area A2 course sections use Fresh Voices as the main course textbook, so students are constantly reading, discussing, analyzing, and learning from the writing of their published peers. Students come to see how other first-year students imagine and respond to the same kinds of rhetorical situations they’ll be facing in their own writing: using the strategies of narrative writing to tell personal stories, using ethnographic approaches to represent communities that are meaningful to them, and learning to argue ethically about urgent public issues that impact them.

Publication in Fresh Voices is competitive, with an average acceptance rate of around 20%. In a typical year, editors receive approximately two hundred submissions and select approximately forty essays for publication. To learn more about Fresh Voices and to submit your work, please visit the Fresh Voices submission page.

Students whose work is published receive one complimentary contributor copy and are eligible for the annual FYCP Writing Award, a $100 prize given to the best essay published in that edition.

Fresh Voices has been published annually since 2007. You can view the entire back catalog on Cal Poly’s DigitalCommons.