Summer 2020 Impact Report

One side effect of living, writing, working, cooking, dancing, teaching, crying, and reading at home is we can develop tunnel vision (or Zoombie™ vision) and lose a sense of the bigger picture. For that reason, we decided to take stock of how the season has gone in our Summer 2020 Impact Report. What follows are some highlights from the summer so far, but check out the full report here.

  • Festival fever: Virtual Lit Fest 2020, offered online for the first time in fifteen years, saw attendance increase by 133%.
  • Youth camp cavalcade: Our virtual summer camps for young writers saw interest swell along with tween and teen attention spans: up 112% over last summer.
  • Extended engagements: Even though some of our community events had to temporarily shut down due to venue closures, almost all are back up and running virtually, serving nearly 3,000 members of the community over the past few months.
  • Still need good reads: Some of our favorite pandemic reads came from our own brilliant faculty and members, including this Harper’s essay by Khadijah Queen, whose new poetry book, Anodyne, joins two other faculty releases in this eventful August: David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Winter Counts) and Elisa Gabbert (The Unreality of Memory). Celebrate with these fabulous writers on August 29. (Register here and, in coming days, you can order signed books from Book Bar.)

Many of the summer's highlights, from Lit Fest salons to happy hour readings, can be viewed on our YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can hear from our faculty members on our podcast and blog any day, and keep writing with us with our Weekly Writing Prompts.