Join us Friday, March 14th for our annual Spring Open House! This is a great chance to meet our team, and many of our incredible community partners, and enjoy FREE food, non-alcoholic beverages, and music!

We’ll have food from Olympia Provisions, desserts from Petunia’s Pies & Pastries, and music from Wonderly!

Along with learning about all of our programming, you’ll have the opportunity to learn more about some of our community partners, including:

Blanchet House
Bishop and Wilde
El Jardín
Fora Health
Revel Indoor Cycling
Rose Haven

We can't wait to see you there!

"Get Ready To Be Blown Away by Lizzie No’s Songwriting" — Rolling Stone

"I love Kasey Anderson’s writing – he’s a writer’s writer, which I often say about songwriters who tend to write as though they are building a narrative arc for a book within each song." — Hanif Abdurraqib

Join writer songwriters Lizzie No and Kasey Anderson for an evening of conversation, community and performance, as they share their work and discuss their recovery.

This event is part of the Alano Club's Artists in Recovery series. It is FREE, all-ages and open to all but donations supporting the Artists in Recovery programming are encouraged and can be made here.

YOU'RE INVITED to our FREE celebration to kick off the Alano Club's 2024 Give!Guide campaign. RSVP below!

We're back in the Give!Guide and excited to gather with our community to kick off this year's fundraising campaign! Join us at the beautiful Bodecker Foundation house in NW Portland for a free kickoff party, featuring food from Olympia Provisions, NA drinks courtesy of Ever AFter, and a DJ set by Sonny Phono.

We'll have QR codes and iPads ready to take donations on the spot, and any donation made at the party automatically enters you to win a gift package including gift certificates from our neighborhood partners The Yo Store, Kate's Ice Cream, and Kiva Day Spa!

Meeting Thursdays September 19 - October 24
From 6-8pm in the Cafe

We are proud to once again collaborate with Write Around Portland to present a FREE six-week creative writing workshop!

Write Around Portland has been facilitating creative writing programs in underserved communities since 1999. And we’ve seen growth, transformations, and change in everyone from middle school students to senior citizens.

The concept of a creative writing workshop comes from academia. Workshops are “hands-on” learning akin to a science lab or an art studio (rather than a lecture.)

At Write Around Portland, we have adapted this academic model to a context outside of the classroom. Our workshops are designed to show participants that they are already writers, to take ownership of the group, and to know that they are active and valued members of a community of writers. 

A study in the American Journal of Public Health observed in 2010 that people who regularly wrote exhibited “statistically significant improvements” in memory, stress levels, immune function, blood pressure, and social behavior.

Over the years, we’ve also found that participants in our workshops:

• Develop new friendships and feel less lonely

• Become more confident in their writing and interpersonal skills

• Find positive ways to work in groups

• Feel a sense of pride at seeing their name in print

• Feel a sense of relief at telling their story

Learn more about the research behind creative writing and its healing effects.

Meeting Thursdays September 19 - October 24
From 6-8pm in the Cafe

We are proud to once again collaborate with Write Around Portland to present a FREE six-week creative writing workshop!

Write Around Portland has been facilitating creative writing programs in underserved communities since 1999. And we’ve seen growth, transformations, and change in everyone from middle school students to senior citizens.

The concept of a creative writing workshop comes from academia. Workshops are “hands-on” learning akin to a science lab or an art studio (rather than a lecture.)

At Write Around Portland, we have adapted this academic model to a context outside of the classroom. Our workshops are designed to show participants that they are already writers, to take ownership of the group, and to know that they are active and valued members of a community of writers. 

A study in the American Journal of Public Health observed in 2010 that people who regularly wrote exhibited “statistically significant improvements” in memory, stress levels, immune function, blood pressure, and social behavior.

Over the years, we’ve also found that participants in our workshops:

• Develop new friendships and feel less lonely

• Become more confident in their writing and interpersonal skills

• Find positive ways to work in groups

• Feel a sense of pride at seeing their name in print

• Feel a sense of relief at telling their story

Learn more about the research behind creative writing and its healing effects.

Meeting Thursdays September 19 - October 24
From 6-8pm in the Cafe

We are proud to once again collaborate with Write Around Portland to present a FREE six-week creative writing workshop!

Write Around Portland has been facilitating creative writing programs in underserved communities since 1999. And we’ve seen growth, transformations, and change in everyone from middle school students to senior citizens.

The concept of a creative writing workshop comes from academia. Workshops are “hands-on” learning akin to a science lab or an art studio (rather than a lecture.)

At Write Around Portland, we have adapted this academic model to a context outside of the classroom. Our workshops are designed to show participants that they are already writers, to take ownership of the group, and to know that they are active and valued members of a community of writers. 

A study in the American Journal of Public Health observed in 2010 that people who regularly wrote exhibited “statistically significant improvements” in memory, stress levels, immune function, blood pressure, and social behavior.

Over the years, we’ve also found that participants in our workshops:

• Develop new friendships and feel less lonely

• Become more confident in their writing and interpersonal skills

• Find positive ways to work in groups

• Feel a sense of pride at seeing their name in print

• Feel a sense of relief at telling their story

Learn more about the research behind creative writing and its healing effects.

An Evening with Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Kasey Anderson, and Laura Gibson

Poems, Songs and Stories in the Round
A Benefit for the Alano Club of Portland

Join us for a very special evening of poems, songs and conversation as Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Kasey Anderson and Laura Gibson perform in the round.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.)

His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In Americawith Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. His newest book, the New York Times Bestseller There’s Always This Year, was published March 26, 2024 by Penguin Random House. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Kaveh Akbar‘s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine(Penguin Classics 2022). Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel, was published by Knopf January 23, 2024 and became an immediate New York Times Bestseller.

Kasey Anderson is a self-proclaimed gradually retiring songwriter whose songs have been praised by Rolling Stone, Paste, No Depression, and NPR among others, and covered by artists such as Counting Crows and Star Anna. Kasey’s final album, To the Places We Lived, will be released October 4, 2024 on Nervous Kid Records. Kasey holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Northwest College of Arts and an MA in English and Literature from Mercy College. He is currently completing his third graduate degree, in Critical Studies, at PNCA.

Laura Gibson is an internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and producer, born and raised in the small Oregon logging town of Coquille. Her most recent album Goners (Barsuk/City Slang) is a meditation on grief and empathy which The Fader described as, “so incessantly beautiful that one cannot help but want to gently crack it open to get to its beating core.” The New York Times summarized its themes: “longing and instinct, and whether they can ever converge.”

Both literary and raw, with a love of traditional folk music and a bent toward experimentation, Gibson has toured four continents and had the distinct honor of performing the very first NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Between albums, Gibson earned an MFA in fiction writing from Hunter College, completing her thesis in the back of a tour van. She’s been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ucross, and AIRIE Everglades; is the recipient of a Hertog fellowship and a RACC Grant; and remains a frequent collaborator with both major arts organizations and her indie rock peers.

Meeting Thursdays September 19 - October 24
From 6-8pm in the Cafe

We are proud to once again collaborate with Write Around Portland to present a FREE six-week creative writing workshop!

Write Around Portland has been facilitating creative writing programs in underserved communities since 1999. And we’ve seen growth, transformations, and change in everyone from middle school students to senior citizens.

The concept of a creative writing workshop comes from academia. Workshops are “hands-on” learning akin to a science lab or an art studio (rather than a lecture.)

At Write Around Portland, we have adapted this academic model to a context outside of the classroom. Our workshops are designed to show participants that they are already writers, to take ownership of the group, and to know that they are active and valued members of a community of writers. 

A study in the American Journal of Public Health observed in 2010 that people who regularly wrote exhibited “statistically significant improvements” in memory, stress levels, immune function, blood pressure, and social behavior.

Over the years, we’ve also found that participants in our workshops:

• Develop new friendships and feel less lonely

• Become more confident in their writing and interpersonal skills

• Find positive ways to work in groups

• Feel a sense of pride at seeing their name in print

• Feel a sense of relief at telling their story

Learn more about the research behind creative writing and its healing effects.