About at Louis Place

at Louis Place (aLP) is a community for writers: artists, musicians, filmmakers, activists, and others who write for pleasure and liberation. Its community includes choreographers and dancers, traditional scholars, critics and independent scholars, visual artists, playwrights, and every other kind of writer. It is intergenerational—members range in age from their early 20s to late 60s—and includes published writers and writers who have not published at all, or who are building a new relationship to writing.

at Louis Place was founded in 2020 by visual artist Steffani Jemison and writer Quincy Flowers to facilitate peer-led, non-hierarchical learning and exchange for writers and artists. Artist and writer Naima Lowe is a co-facilitator in charge of strengthening and clarifying the community infrastructure and programming.

Through an online platform, aLP offers a vast library of writing prompts, recorded workshops, and other materials that members can access at any time. The online platform and asynchronous offerings enable aLP to prioritize writers who are parents, caregivers, disabled writers and writers with chronic illness, rural writers, and others whose access to in-person creative communities is limited. Writers at Louis Place report benefiting from access to a shared intellectual and co-learning community that is affordable, accessible, and inclusive of members’ input and insight as creative practitioners, offering many of the benefits of a writing school (intellectual rigor, skill sharing, collaboration, and structured community) without the hierarchy, gatekeeping, and high cost of entry. aLP writers use the platform to engage their writing practices as it intersects with all aspects of their creative, personal, and professional lives.

Writers in the aLP community have mounted ambitious new performance works and exhibitions, published books and completed dissertations, and received nationally recognized awards. No less significantly, many members report a renewed sense of agency and confidence in their creative practice. This is all possible because at Louis Place operates as a co-supportive community that values every member’s contributions, capacities, and input regardless of professional status or level of formal education.

About the American Academy of Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Our 300 members distribute over $1.2 million in awards annually; fund concerts and new works of musical theater; purchase and commission contemporary art for donation to museums across the country; and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public at our historic buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

The galleries of Arts and Letters are in the process of building our public mailing list. To receive future mailings about art events at Arts and Letters, drop us a line: academy@artsandletters.org.