Our Story
New Literary Project invests in students & teachers, readers & authors, and it inspires and equips writers across the generations to write their hearts out. New Literary Project offers writing workshops free of charge for marginalized younger writers; celebrates storytellers and storytelling through a major national award to a mid-career author of fiction (the Joyce Carol Oates Prize); supports creative writers teaching high school to make time to work on their own projects; and makes possible readings, events, and publication in our annual anthology of Project-connected authors, Simpsonistas. (In fact, and please don’t take this in the wrong way, our literary events make for great parties.)
The Project came together in 2015 in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, the world’s foremost English Department, in the world’s leading public university, and the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation. Until April 2021 we called ourselves the Simpson Literary Project, to honor the example set by Sharon Simpson and the late Barclay Simpson, legendary pillars of soulful support for education, the arts, and social justice. Our dear friend Sharon actively continues to engage and inspire us.
We acknowledge and fight systemic racism and inequity.
We drive social change by unleashing artistic power in neglected, overlooked, and undervalued communities. Our writers write their hearts out across generations, divisions, differences. Our workshop leaders celebrate the visible and invisible qualities making students who they are. In all these ways, New Literary Project is organically, programmatically, institutionally committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We welcome every person’s unique perspective and experience.
NewLit community members, donors, volunteers, advocates, and employees are valued and respected—whatever their gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, sexual orientation or identity, economic status, education, or disability.
We center diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in our work.
We urge all who value reading, writing, teaching, literature, and literacy to join us and be committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.
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