About us
At Louis Place is a home that facilitates the liberation of imagination through writing. We believe that imagination, made elastic, generates the energy needed to build the world we're waiting for. We believe in the power of intentional creative communities.
Our workshops, conversations and happenings create space for experimentation with the real and the possible. Founded as a community-based alternative to traditional, craft-based writing schools, At Louis Place serves its neighbors in Weeksville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill, Brownsville, East New York, and beyond.
At Louis Place is led by Quincy Flowers, a writer and educator.
A note from our founder
My name is Quincy Flowers. I believe in valuing knowledge wherever it exists. I founded at Louis Place to provide an incubator for those engaged in revising and re-visioning traditionally elitist and homogeneous practices of world building.
My higher education began at a community college, where I met two professors who made an unforgettable impression on me. One encouraged me to continue writing, and the other inspired me to change the world by extending access to high quality education.
With their support, I studied creative writing and literature at Kennesaw State University (BA), New York University (MA), and the University of Houston (PhD, Literature and Creative Writing). Along the way, I taught undergraduates at NYU, John Jay College, LIU Brooklyn, and the University of Houston. I spent a year in a tenure-track position at SUNY Orange before receiving an offer from my dream job, at Kingsborough Community College.
Working at Kingsborough was incredibly rewarding. I loved finding fresh ways to support students with wide-ranging intellectual premises, requirements, and goals. Their unique writing compositions reflected their expansive ideas: they were complex, irreducible, sprawling, wild, messy.
When academics see a mess, we clean it up. We fix incoherence by scaffolding beginning writers with masters’ tools. We promise that “you have to know the rules in order to break the rules.” Our task is to murder everything that we don’t understand.
But my approach is different. I always begin with a writer’s own ideas, which are inseparable from the form they take. I create space for writers to collaborate with other thinkers, prompt them to write and think in ways they may not have expected, help them find points of contact and exchange with others, and, when I can, help them find an appropriate container to transmit their thoughts—recognizing that the container is not going to look like a cube or a tube or a box, but may be more like a jellyfish or a garbage bag or a cloth or a fist.
My higher education began at a community college, where I met two professors who made an unforgettable impression on me. One encouraged me to continue writing, and the other inspired me to change the world by extending access to high quality education.
With their support, I studied creative writing and literature at Kennesaw State University (BA), New York University (MA), and the University of Houston (PhD, Literature and Creative Writing). Along the way, I taught undergraduates at NYU, John Jay College, LIU Brooklyn, and the University of Houston. I spent a year in a tenure-track position at SUNY Orange before receiving an offer from my dream job, at Kingsborough Community College.
Working at Kingsborough was incredibly rewarding. I loved finding fresh ways to support students with wide-ranging intellectual premises, requirements, and goals. Their unique writing compositions reflected their expansive ideas: they were complex, irreducible, sprawling, wild, messy.
When academics see a mess, we clean it up. We fix incoherence by scaffolding beginning writers with masters’ tools. We promise that “you have to know the rules in order to break the rules.” Our task is to murder everything that we don’t understand.
But my approach is different. I always begin with a writer’s own ideas, which are inseparable from the form they take. I create space for writers to collaborate with other thinkers, prompt them to write and think in ways they may not have expected, help them find points of contact and exchange with others, and, when I can, help them find an appropriate container to transmit their thoughts—recognizing that the container is not going to look like a cube or a tube or a box, but may be more like a jellyfish or a garbage bag or a cloth or a fist.