In a high school world that loves neat categories and clean wins, Amber Wang built something that refused to fit into a single line on a resume.

It started with a feeling she could not shake. Literature, as she was seeing it in class, often felt sealed off. Great books were treated like artifacts rather than living things. The conversation ended where it should have begun.

Amber wanted reading to feel urgent again. Not just something you did for analysis questions, but something you argued with, questioned, and carried into your own life. So she built the kind of space she wished existed.

That space became The Collective, a student-led literary magazine created to make literature accessible and socially relevant for young people. The mission was clear from the beginning: pair creative expression with real critical thinking, and let students lead the conversation.

At first, “student-led” meant one student doing almost everything.

Amber curated themes, edited submissions, designed layouts, organized publication, and handled outreach. She was not just overseeing a magazine. She was building the structure behind it from scratch, learning what it takes to turn an idea into something others can actually join.

Then it grew.

Instead of keeping The Collective within her school’s borders, Amber expanded submissions across her local community. Contributors came from five other nearby high schools, turning the magazine into something bigger than a campus project. It became a shared platform, one that connected students who had never met but shared the same passion for serious writing and thoughtful reading.

As the magazine gained momentum, Amber created another way for students to participate: a high school literary magazine competition that slowly expanded to three other states beyond hers. For a teenager running this largely through self-directed outreach, that growth is the point. The impact is measurable. The work moved from one creator to many contributors, and from one school to a multi-state orbit.

Taking the Conversation Off the Page

Around the same time, Amber launched Marginalia, a Spotify podcast that extended The Collective’s ideas into long-form conversation.

If the magazine is where students publish, the podcast is where they hear it out. Amber hosts episodes that explore literature, philosophy, culture, and how stories shape people’s understanding of history and identity. For her, the purpose is not simply summarizing books, but to ask what they do to us, what they hide, and what they reveal.

The name Marginalia is a mission statement, an ode to the notes readers scribble in the margins, the private arguments and questions they ask. Amber built her platform around that idea: young readers should not just consume literature. They should respond to it.

Running a magazine and a podcast at the same time made one thing obvious very quickly: creative vision alone does not scale.

More submissions meant more editing. More collaborators meant more coordination. Deadlines slipped. Responsibilities overlapped. People needed clearer expectations, and Amber felt the pressure that hits almost every founder at some point, the moment your project stops being “yours” and becomes something other people rely on.

She could have kept it small. Instead, she made it sturdier.

Amber built a clearer editorial hierarchy, defined roles for editors, writers, and designers, and set contribution requirements to clarify expectations for contributors. She committed to a consistent thematic vision for each issue and episode, which made the work feel less like scattered passion and more like an actual publication rhythm.

That shift mattered. The Collective started functioning less like an after-school club and more like a real institution, still creative, still student-driven, but built on systems strong enough to hold growth.

Booking Guests Who Raised the Bar

Simultaneously, Amber struggled with getting people to say yes to her podcast as a high school student, trying to build credibility in real time.

But she did it anyway.

Among her guests were Julia Riew, a New York Times bestselling author, and Helen Li, a New York Times freelance writer. Bringing them onto a youth-led podcast signals a level of seriousness, outreach, and trust that many student projects never reach.

More importantly, those conversations became a form of access for students listening in. It is one thing to read great work. It is another to hear directly from writers working at the highest levels, talking about craft, ideas, and what it takes to build a life around writing. For young listeners who love literature but do not always see a path into it, that kind of dialogue can quietly change what feels possible.

That is what Amber has been building across both platforms: permission. Permission for students to write seriously. To think in public. To disagree thoughtfully. To treat literature not as something distant, but something they can enter, reshape, and share.

A Platform that Feels Like a Place

It is easy to call something “community” when it is really just a group chat. Amber’s work looks more like community in the older sense of the word: a place where people contribute, learn from, and come back to.

The Collective gives students a chance to publish and be edited with care. Marginalia gives them a chance to hear long-form conversations that treat literature as more than an academic exercise. The competition gives them a deadline, a stage, and the feeling that their work is part of something wider than their own school.

None of this happened because Amber had extra time. It happened because she wanted literature to feel alive, and she did what founders do when they cannot find what they are looking for.

She made it.