September Community Outreach
2025 was a year of connection, creativity, and growth. We gathered to celebrate our community, honored partners who make our work possible, amplified voices through live storytelling and publications, expanded writing programs across schools and communities, and reached writers of all ages—reflecting the heart of Project Write Now: storytelling as a force for belonging, healing, and change.
A big highlight of the year was coming together in October for our annual Community Celebration, during which we honored our community partners with awards, including Senator Vin Gopal, educator Jenny Morelli, the team at Two River Theater, and volunteers Kelly Cullen, Jennifer Gaites, and Shanda McManus. We also featured readers from across our programs, including Sklya Bicca, Miliani Torres, Joseph Serrano-Olguin, Grace Kellett, Shani Love, Kate Cordaro, and Elyse Kehoe.
Another major highlight of 2025 was participating in the Prudential North to Shore Festival with our Sound Bytes: Stories & Food for the Soul event, in collaboration with The City of Asbury Park Mayor’s Wellness Committee and featuring stories shared by ten notable Asbury Park residents and delicious food from Ada’s Gojjo, Cardinal Provisions, and Cookman Creamery.
We also welcomed Meredith Avakian into a full-time position as our director of community outreach & engagement and celebrated Lisa Hartsgrove’s 10-Year Anniversary with PWN!
We are more excited than ever to carry this incredible momentum into 2026. But first, a look back on our 2025 accomplishments …
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
– We continued our long-standing expressive writing programs at Red Bank Middle School and Asbury Park High School, culminating the year with three published anthologies of student writing and Writers Celebrations. With APHS, we hosted our Writers Celebration at the Asbury Book Cooperative.
– We brought the creative writing class from Asbury Park High School to Monmouth University’s Toni Morrison Day. Three of our students read their original work in front of an audience of college students, professors, and staff as part of the event.
– In collaboration with the Two River Theater’s Crossing Borders Festival, which celebrates Latine playwrights, three of our young adult writers performed original pieces to kick off each staged reading. During their inaugural Stories From the Heart event, some of our 7th and 8th grade AVID students at Red Bank Middle School read their original pieces from their respective anthologies.
– We provided in-school multi-session writing programs for grades 6 through 8 at Markham Place in Little Silver.
– We provided five after-school writing clubs in Red Bank and Asbury Park.
– We added a new PWN India writing club, PWN India for 8th graders, and continued our programs for children (ages 10-12); teachers (of children ages 3-6), and adults. We published a special edition of Bridge Ink featuring our PWN India youth writers.
– We participated for our third year in a row in the New Jersey Pride Parade in Asbury Park.
– We partnered with more than 30 organizations/schools to deliver our community outreach programs, including Asbury Book Cooperative, Kula Urban Farm, Lunch Break, Mayor’s Wellness Committee of Asbury Park, Mental Health Association of Monmouth County, Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Asbury Park), Planned Parenthood, Project HEAL / Elevate, and Two River Theater. Among our new partnerships are Blue Dot: Social and Community Wellness, Brookdale’s GEAR UP, Collier Group Home, Creating Change, Heartwarming Center (Red Bank), Long Branch Girls Symposium, Red Bank UMC Youth Group, Red Bank Senior Center, Over the Moon (Asbury Park), The Salvation Army, TORCH Leadership Academy, and the YMCA (Red Bank).
– We awarded 45 scholarship seats to youth and adults, totaling $12,619 for our fee-based programs.
– We impacted nearly 2,000 children, teens, and adults through our community outreach programs.
LIVE STORYTELLING
– We held our annual fundraiser, CringeFest, on the big stage at the Vogel in Red Bank with lots of laughs and lots of funds raised for our community outreach programs.
– We relaunched Firefly: Stories Out Loud at its new home at Two River Theater with events in August and November featuring 17 storytellers on stage. We created a new class, Stories on Stage, to inspire and support more people to write their stories to be performed on stage.
– In collaboration with Monmouth Arts, we hosted our first True Colors: A Storytelling Celebration honoring LGBTQ+ voices. Three featured storytellers shared their words before we invited the audience to participate.
– We continued our collaborative playwriting program, Community Playmaking, with the Two River Theater, partnering with Shore House, Asbury Park Public Library, and Lunch Break. In total, 23 playwrights wrote original 10-minute plays that were performed by professional actors at events in their respective communities.
– We had several instructors and writers participate in Generation Women NJ, an intergenerational storytelling event. We are honored to be a community partner supporting their good work.
EDUCATION
– We held our SIXTH annual Writing on the River Retreat at the Oyster Point Hotel for more than 40 teachers.
– We collaborated with T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center and Two River Theater to provide three Art of Social Justice professional development days for educators.
– We continued our Teacher Writing Collaborative monthly writing group.
PWN TEEN
– We published SIX issues of our online young adult literary journal, Bridge Ink, featuring writers from the United States (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington), China, India, and South Korea.
– We celebrated 12 winners of our annual teen Voices & Verse poetry contest. We then published their pieces in Bridge Ink and held a Writers Celebration on Zoom during which winners shared their winning words.
– More than 30 teens participated in our summer internship program as teaching assistants, editorial assistants, and in The Interview Project. We collaborated with Trinity Church in Asbury Park for The Interview Project—ten teens interviewed members and documented their stories for a special issue of Bridge Ink, coming soon.
– We provided our first-ever full-time internship that earned our intern high school credits in lieu of classes. We also have two part-time high school interns who have been instrumental in developing all of our programming. One intern launched our Write & Reverie creative networking event for teens.
– We adjudicated more than 130 pieces of teen writing as part of Monmouth Arts’ Teen Arts Festival.
– We continued offering creative programming for teens such as Teen Writing Space and began a new virtual accountability Teen Free Write group.
PWN WRITERS
– We launched pwnwriters.org, a centralized course catalog making it simpler for writers to browse and register for classes.
– Every weekday morning, writers across the country showed up for our new program, Morning Pages, turning the solitary act of writing into a sustainable shared practice.
– We offered numerous opportunities for writers to learn and grow: 38 adult classes and nearly 60 one-day workshops. We also offered two day-long retreats.
– Fifteen writers completed their manuscript drafts through the structured support and community of book inc’s yearlong Memoir and Novel Incubators.
– Twenty-four writers strengthened their manuscripts through professional story consultation, peer feedback, and community accountability in book inc’s Book Revision Lab.
– Ten writers polished their query letters, synopses, and opening pages with community feedback and professional coaching in book inc’s Book Submission Bootcamp.
– book inc published 48 Journal essays with weekly writing tips on craft and process from our writer community distributed via our website, Substack, and LinkedIn. The Journal includes “Ask Tina,” an advice column for writers.
– We supported writers’ publication goals by hosting the monthly Lit Mag Sub Club and Submission Sundays, creating accountability around the submission process.
– PWN made its debut at AWP, the largest literary conference in North America, held in Los Angeles. We’ll be returning to AWP in March 2026. Join us in Baltimore!
– We hosted author readings featuring Paul Lisicky, Penny Guisinger, and Laura Julier, and launched Friends & Features, a new series pairing notable authors like Melissa Febos with emerging and debut writers.
– Nearly 30 adult writers had their work published or formally recognized. Publications include Brevity Blog, Tahoma Literary Review, Literary Mama, Friends Journal, LatinosUSA, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bull, Sudden Flash, Fictive Dreams, Steel Jackdaw (UK print journal), Does It Have Pockets, The Mersey Review, among many others.
– Three book inc writers signed publishing contracts, marking significant achievements for our community with book launch events planned throughout 2026.
– Writers achieved notable successes, including a Pushcart Prize nomination, Best of the Net nominations, Hedgebrook residency admission, Flannery O’Connor Peacock Guild induction, and acceptance into a competitive national juried exhibition.
None of this would be possible without the generosity and care of this community—including our supporters, staff, community partners, and all who participated in our classes, workshops, and events.
Together, we are not only changing lives through writing but also building an inclusive, creative community.
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