September Community Outreach
Dear Friends of Project Write Now:
This month, we were reminded of the many ways creativity brings people together.
From classrooms to community spaces, we gathered to celebrate our unique voices and stories—and found a deeper sense of connection and belonging.
Nearly 100 people filled the iconic Carousel House in Asbury Park for our first-ever Silent Reading & Writing Party as part of the North to Shore Festival. Held in collaboration with our friends at Asbury Book Cooperative and Asbury Park Public Library, we spent an hour mingling before settling in with books and journals for an hour of quiet reading and writing.
The evening was a celebration of something we don’t always make enough time for: reading, writing, and being fully present!
A few days earlier, we celebrated our yearlong program at RBMS with Writers Celebrations. Each student read their piece from our newly published anthologies aloud to the applause of their peers.
We were in awe of how this celebration reflected the connection and belonging created all year through our program.
At at time when educators, parents, and community leaders are grappling with what our children need most right now, our students have answers, as shared in a recent survey: creativity, self-expression, and belonging.
Read “What Do Our Kids Need Right Now” here →
Thank you for being part of a community that continues to create spaces for stories—and for one another.
With love & gratitude,
Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month. If you are interested in bringing a community outreach program to your school or mission-based organization, email Meredith Z. Avakian, Director of Community Outreach & Engagement, at meredith@projectwritenow.org.
Asbury Park Pride Parade
We are so proud to have marched in the New Jersey Pride Festival Parade in Asbury Park for our fourth year in a row! We handed out more than 1,400 rainbow PWN pencils as we smiled, waved, and wished everyone a Happy Pride through the streets. We are so grateful to all who marched with us and all who cheered us on. It’s always such a powerful day filled with so much love and connection!
Book Talking & Signing with Shanda McManus
On June 24, Project Write Now welcomed a full house to The Columbus Club in Fair Haven for an intimate reading and conversation with author Shanda McManus. Shanda read from her debut memoir, Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir—a series of letters to her brother Monir, killed in a drive-by shooting in Philadelphia in 1992—and sat down with writer Jennifer Gaites to talk about writing across grief, holding personal loss and public urgency on the same page, and what it means to demand a reckoning through literature. The room was full, the conversation was honest, and the evening was exactly what community looks like when stories are told with courage and care. We are so grateful to Shanda for sharing her work with us, and to everyone who came out to support her.
HABcore Community Playmaking Showcase
We concluded another successful Community Playmaking program in collaboration with Two River Theater and in partnership with participants from HABcore. The showcase featured original plays written by HABcore participants and brought to life by professional actors under the direction of playwright and actor Iraisa Ann Reilly. Alongside instructors from Project Write Now and Two River Theater, Iraisa helped guide participants through the creative process, transforming ideas, memories, and imagination into scripts for the stage. We are so grateful to our partners at HABcore, Two River Theater, and Lunch Break for making this program possible. As always, we are in awe of the stories that emerge when people are given the space to create, share, and be heard.
LGBTQIA Celebration
Asbury Book Cooperative hosted a celebration of eight LGBTQ+ writers at the end of the NJ Pride Parade, featuring @jackie.d.writes, @chrispup, @lezzdoothis, @jerryportwood, @livesinpages, @bethiebookworm, @darcyjaygagnon, and our own PWN program coordinator @lisahartsgrove.
Lunchtime Write-In
Writers continued to meet virtually on Fridays for Lunchtime Write-In to write and share original stories and poems. This month, we explored the themes—“Glow” and “Juneteenth.” We love the writing community that has formed in this group and we are always open to welcoming new participants. Lunchtime Write-In meets on Fridays at 12:15 p.m. ET. Join us for our next Lunchtime Write-In to see what our upcoming theme will be!
Markham Place – Spoken Word Poetry
We’ve been leading spoken-word poetry sessions with all the seventh-grade students at Markham Place Middle School in Little Silver again this year, culminating in its annual poetry slam this month. Every seventh-grade student wrote, memorized, and performed an original poem for the poetry slam. Students had the option of performing as a solo act, duo, or trio. Three individual winners and three groups of poets were selected, all of whom received PWN rainbow T-shirts as a special prize to commemorate the experience. Congratulations to all of the seventh graders for being brave enough to share your words on a mic, on stage, in front of all of your peers! We enjoyed returning this school year and wish everyone a wonderful summer!
Morning Pages
Committed writers continued to meet on Zoom for Morning Pages for an hour every weekday, from 8 to 9 a.m. ET. Want to join us? Sign up for July’s Morning Pages and write with us on weekdays through the month. We are so grateful for the community that has formed around starting our days with words on a page!
Poetry with Alina & Skyla
PWN Teen Ambassadors Alina & Skyla ran another inspirational poetry workshop, this time around LGBTQ+ poets for Pride Month. After breaking down works line by line and opening discussions about interpretations, we used published poems to inspire original pieces of our own. We are in conversations about bringing this bi-weekly poetry workshop back through the summer. Stay tuned!
Red Bank Middle School AVID (in-school)
We are thrilled to wish a big congratulations to our 7th & 8th grade AVID writers at Red Bank Middle School! During our annual Writers Celebrations, each student shared the piece they submitted to their anthology, We’re Just Getting Started (7th grade) and 21 Voices (8th grade). We loved not only hearing the pieces read aloud, but also the snaps and claps as students cheered one another on! It is often said that the AVID classes are like family, and our Writers Celebrations truly showcased that spirit. It has been such an honor to write alongside these students and become a small part of their journey this year. Thank you to the entire Red Bank Borough Public Schools community for embracing Project Write Now and our philosophy of teaching writing. And a special thank you to Chelsey Cooney and Alyssa Geary, who welcomed us into their classrooms and created nurturing spaces where students could write, reflect, and share together. Our community outreach programs are made possible by generous donations from individuals, foundations, businesses, and community organizations. We are especially grateful to The Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation for selecting PWN for an NBCUniversal Local Impact Grant, which helps support this program.
Red Bank Pride
We were happy to participate in Red Bank’s Pride in the Park again, handing out notebooks, stickers, and bookmarks. Though it was hot, there was still a huge turnout of love and support. Last year it rained, and we felt the same way. No weather stops Red Bank Pride! We are so grateful to all who stopped by our table and can’t wait to be back again next year!
Shore House
We continued Pride celebrations at Shore House, talking about what Pride means to us and what we are personally proud of ourselves. After a guided meditation by Danica of The Heart Space, we read “Movement Song” by Audre Lorde, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Inspired by Lorde’s poem, we took the line “Do not remember” and wrote about all the things we want people to forget about ourselves. We gave examples like “Do not remember that I arrived late.” Then we flipped it and wrote about all of the things we want people to remember, instead. Like, “Remember that I arrived at all.” All of the writing was powerful, but we especially loved when writer Tim shared that there’s absolutely nothing he wants people to forget about who he is. (We couldn’t forget you if we tried, Tim!) In our second session this month, we continued celebrations by reading “i love you to the moon &” by Chen Chen and writing about love. The members surprised our instructor, Lisa Hartsgrove, with a little party to celebrate her wedding on June 26. It was certainly a day filled with LOVE!
True Colors: A Storytelling Celebration
We had an AMAZING evening for our second annual True Colors event! We’d like to thank Monmouth Arts for inviting us into their incredibly inspiring space again, our awesome featured readers—Kate Feeney, Justin Javier, and Nyla Winning—for sharing your hearts with us, every person who added your name to the bucket and spontaneously shared your heartfelt stories, too, and last but not least, we are most grateful to YOU, our community, who came together to honor and support LGBTQ+ voices! (It was a special surprise that two of our original teen writers from over 10 years ago came back to attend this event as well!) We can’t wait to continue this tradition for years to come.
Write Out Loud (Asbury Park)
We came together for a special Pride Month edition of Write Out Loud. We let our inner child run free as we interacted with the physical space of Asbury Book Cooperative, picked out books by unfamiliar authors whose covers spoke to our playful selves, and drew inspiration from them to write in the voice of the young spirits inside us. We are increasingly grateful as new members continue to join us and share their writing with the PWN community! Join us for our next Asbury Write Out Loud on July 14 at 7 p.m.
Scholarship Seats
Through our mission as a nonprofit organization, we remove barriers to participating in our fee-based classes by providing full and partial scholarship seats as well as payment plans. In 2025, we provided 45 seats totaling $12,619.00. So far for 2026, we’ve offered 23 seats totaling $7,035. For information about our scholarship program or to become a valuable donor providing these seats, please email Jennifer Chauhan at jennifer@projectwritenow.org.
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