welcome to at Louis Place, 
a liberatory home for writers.

at Louis Place is a community for writers. All activities are open to every writer in our community. We usually accept new writers three times each year. This season, we will accept new writers through May 31, 2025

If you know you’re ready to sign up to write with us, you can head directly to the registration form. If you know you want to attend the information session, you can sign up for that here. Otherwise, read on for more information about our Summer 2025 offerings. 

✌🏾 You seek nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary, intergenerational intellectual exchange

✌🏾 You write or think meaningfully about writing in relation to your creative work

✌🏾 You want to be in comfortable, private, and drama-free conversation with ambitious writers (editors, playwrights, scholars, performers, artists, curators, activists) from around the world. We are in the cities currently known as Lima, Austin, Chicago, Mexico City, Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, New Haven, Washington DC, Cincinnati, Harlem, New Jersey, Atlanta, and more.  

✌🏾 You prioritize Black voices & revolutionary dreams.

✌🏾 You want to share ideas and feedback and frustrations with other writers. 

✌🏾 You are willing to give as much as you receive from a community.

Here’s what we’re up to in summer 2025:

6-week generative class with Sharon Bridgforth: This summer, we offer a special six week workshop for all writers at Louis Place—designed to support everyone, across disciplines—with synchronous and asynchronous elements.

Join us in a summer of writing / drawing / collage / moving / breathing in response to prompts based on cards pulled from dat Black Mermaid Man Lady, an oracle deck, performance installation, novel, and tool for “communal wisdom and self-determination through art-gatherings-and resource sharing.”  Centered in Bridgforth's “Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic,” the course will focus on creative process, the art of being present, and deep listening, along with opportunities to share work and ask questions. Everyone will be encouraged to honor their capacity, to take care of themselves, to follow joy/curiosity, and passion. This class offers tools for expansive exploration for writers working in any genre or discipline. 

Attend as many or as few sessions as you are able. A portion of each session will be recorded and shared for those wishing to participate asynchronously. 

Daily writing: We write together for an hour, twice every day (8-9am and 12-1pm ET, Monday through Sunday). Starting this summer, we are also offering evening sessions Sunday-Thursday at 9pm ET. 

Not everyone can join us every day. Some of our writers don’t participate in daily writing at all. For others, quiet daily cowriting is an important anchor. During monthly writing retreats, the Daily writing room is open all day. In Summer 2025, writing retreats—with prompts and encouragement—are lovingly hosted by Jessica Harvey.

Need a reader? Facilitated by Naima Lowe, Project Exchange is a monthly opportunity to exchange pages, ideas, or creative work for feedback with writers in the community. Submit pages for exchange mid-month; meet with your partner to discuss later in the month. Project Exchange is designed for writers who need more or different feedback than they can find in weekly Trajectory sessions (e.g. a second reader on that grant application or fiction submission), as well as for writers who can't commit to weekly sessions. 

We shoot the shit occasionally...strategizing about software, residency applications, chitchatting about articles we've recently read, just hanging out. In recent sessions, we’ve talked about popular education, when to lawyer up, application strategies, and much more. This summer, we’re planning to shoot the shit about boycotts and solidarity strategies for artists and writers, applying for the Hodder and Guggenheim fellowships, making a monograph, and more! Most sessions are recorded, although for privacy reasons, some are only available live.

Looking for a creative group for feedback / feed forward / accountability? About half of us link up with small groups—we call these Trajectory. All groups are interdisciplinary and include a mix of writers from different backgrounds. 

Some Trajectories are supported by our team of Community Liaisons—stewards who help anchor Trajectory groups and keep them running smoothly. Current groups include: 

• 📚 Non-Fiction Fever (workshopping non-fiction projects)
  
• 🔭 Close Encounters (renewing our relationship to creative practice)
  
• 🎭 Weird Scripts (interdisciplinary experiments in performance)
  
• ⚡️Hybrid Forms (working across visual and textual modes.) 
  
• ❤️ Reading and Writing in Community (read together/write together) 
  
• 🧞‍♀️ Fiction Workshop (for novelists and short story writers)   
  
🫁 Breathing Room (workshop for writers of color)

We share prompts and reflections from writers, articles, and events discussed in the community. We’ve got hundreds so far, including new follow-along video prompts. In Summer 2025, new prompts are shared every other week in Wednesday Writing Prompts, a write-along session facilitated by community liaisons.

We gather with guests for generative and horizontal workshops—thinking/writing aloud and alongside our mentors and guides. Writers in our community have access to all guest workshops as well as our growing archive, which includes recordings and notes from sessions led by Gabrielle Civil, Sharon Bridgforth, Morgan Bassichis, Sahra Motalebi, Quincy Flowers, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Cori Olinghouse, Tisa Bryant, Ashon Crawley, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and many others. 

We're excited to welcome some of our favorite interdisciplinary writers and artists to connect with us in the coming months, including Carolyn Lazard (June) as well as Ariel Goldberg, Shirley Bruno, and Lisa Harris (all Fall 2025).