Write Around Portland changes lives through the power of writing.

Since 1999, we’ve run a free creative writing and publishing program for people in our community with the least access to the arts, using writing to reduce isolation, improve mental health, and promote creative self-expression. We’ve held hundreds of writing workshops for more than 7,000 Portlanders, prioritizing outreach to people living on low incomes, experiencing homelessness or incarceration, living with a disability or illness, or who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color. We’ve organized more than 250 community readings and published 62 anthologies of our participants’ work, amplifying underheard voices and utilizing the written word as a tool for personal and societal change.