About Us
Write Around Portland amplifies voices and builds community through our writing workshops, literary programming, books, and readings.
We partner with agencies and organizations (including hospitals, schools, prisons, treatment centers, senior centers, low-income housing buildings, homeless shelters, and other healthcare and social service settings) to provide creative writing workshops for the adults and youth they serve.
We recruit and train volunteers who facilitate the workshops. Workshops are provided for free to participants and include guided playtime, transit tickets, journals, pens, and snacks, as well as other services and accommodations to ensure that everyone has access to writing in community — and the sense of creativity and security that comes with it.
Workshops culminate in community readings where participants from each group share their work with each other and with members of the public.
Because we are committed to finding the widest possible audience for our writers, we also publish books of participants’ writing, which we make available in local bookstores, online, and at the reading.
Our History
Write Around Portland was founded in 1999 by Liza Halley and Ben Moorad.
Our Mission
Write Around Portland changes lives through the power of writing.
We believe:
- Everyone can be a writer and benefit from and contribute to their community through the literary arts.
- Writing is a powerful tool for individual and societal change, self-expression, healing, and the realization of the dignity of one’s self and others.
- Writing and sharing stories helps us access our common humanity and connects individuals and groups who may be separated by age, race, income level, gender, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, health status, education level, and the geographic and social boundaries of neighborhoods.
- In any life, especially one lived in poverty or isolation, there is a vital need for art, community, and joy.
“The only problem with Write Around Portland is knowing how good it is, how necessary it is, and how unfortunate it is that it doesn’t exist in every city and town in the country.”
Dave Eggers
“Write Around Portland is an organization that makes me proud to be a Portlander.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“We are surrounded by poems not written, by songs felt but not heard, by those few saving words we lack courage to say. Write Around Portland helps bring forth the most important literature of our time: the unwritten.”
Kim Stafford
“If you haven’t been to a Write Around Portland reading, you’re missing out on one of the most engaging, amazing literary events in this city.”
Willamette Week