Writers for Street Books
🥳 Our Winter Campaign is officially underway! Learn more and all the ways you can donate here. If you already donated to Street Books this season, thank you! We can only do this work with your support. ❤️
“One can be at home in a book anywhere.” –Kim Stafford, poet, Northwest Writing Institute Founder, author of As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024)
Street Books is celebrating 15 years of nurturing our city’s collective imagination by bringing stories and connection to the streets. We want to reimagine a society that respects dignity, justice, and our shared humanity. For our Winter Campaign this year we’re imagining alongside Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: a book that questions what a city is, what it’s for.
Invisible Cities is structured according to eleven themes that capture the many faces of a city. This week we are thinking about the theme of “Cities and the Sky,” with words from the many wonderful writers who support our work. Words can create worlds of imagination as big as the sky, and we’re grateful to our community of writers for helping all of us expand our capacity to imagine together! We’ve collected some of our favorite quotes from our Writers for Street Books program–read on to find out why our region’s best authors support our street library ❤️
“One can be at home in a book anywhere—a writer speaking just to you.”
Kim Stafford, 9th Oregon Poet Laureate, author of As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024)
“Street Books is unequivocally good. Reading, helping people, making connections, sharing respect. It just makes me happy every time I think about it”.
Peter Rock, author of Passersthrough (Soho Press, 2022)
“People gain purpose, perspective, and strength from the written word, and that’s what Street Books is all about. I love this organization.”
Daniel Nieh, author of Take No Names (Harper Collins, 2023)
“Books are balm for a hurting world. Street Books takes books where people need them. It’s an organization we all benefit from.”
Suzy Harris, poet, author of Listening in the Dark (2022)
“It’s precisely because this isn’t a mechanism of day-to-day survival that it matters so much.”
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025)
“(At Street Books) we get to experience belonging, and what it could be like if we had a different world premised on different values. There just aren’t that many spaces where housed and unhoused neighbors in our city get together.”
Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist, MacArthur Fellow, author of The Antidote (Knopf, 2025) and Swamplandia! (Vintage, 2011)
Can you imagine a better world? Click the button below to help us sustain this important community work for the challenges of the months and years to come, and thank you for your support ❤️
Partner Appreciation:
Write Around Portland
When a Write Around Portland workshop was announced at the Multnomah Safe Rest Village (MSRV), where I run a Street Books shift, one staff member and half a dozen residents joined up.
Emma was twenty years old, a young twenty. She loved to talk about books, choose the next thing to read; she became my assistant librarian. She had serious heart trouble, multiple surgeries and frequent rushes to the ER, long stays in the ICU—where she was, as she said, “treated like a homeless person.” Another way of saying dismissed, not heard.
At the Write Around Portland workshop, they got new writing prompts every time, and they wrote a little and then shared if they wanted to. Despite her medical woes, Emma stuck with the writing activity. It mattered so much to her.
At the last meeting, the participants were invited to read their work aloud before an audience. Three people put their work forward for the anthology. Only Emma dared to read aloud at the Write Around event. In her poem, she wrote, “It makes me angry and kind of sad when they push me aside.” On this night she was not pushed aside.
Emma’s poem, “Another Heartbreak,” is published in the fall 2023 Write Around Portland anthology, The Whole Root. I bought a copy, and put it on the shelves at the MSRV. Emma was so pleased to put a Street Books sticker on a book she was in!
This is what Write Around Portland does for people who have been left on the edges of our city, who have not been heard. They give them courage. They invite them to have a spotlight, and a microphone, to be published writers. To be a voice. I sensed the care the instructors had taken in each location, all over the city: shelters, affordable housing sites, youth drop-in centers, critical care facilities. You could feel it in the room: the support and caring—the listening. For Emma, it meant the world: she was heard.
–Robin Schauffler, Street Books Librarian and board member