About
The Santa Cruz Poetry Project began as the legacy project of Ellen Bass while she was Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County; and co-founder Nancy Miller Gomez, who facilitated the first classes in Santa Cruz. Since its inception, the program has facilitated workshops throughout the county and with your help will continue changing the lives of incarcerated men and women one word, one poem at a time. Co-founder Nancy Miller Gomez (also Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County 2025-26) has been instrumental in keeping the program vital in the Santa Cruz County jail system and organizing fund raisers. Directors Renee Winter and Deborah Culmer keep the day-to-day operations going.
We have volunteer instructors conducting classes at the Main Jail and Blaine Street Medium facilities in Santa Cruz , and Rountree Medium Facility and Rehabilitation and Re-Entry men's facility near Watsonville, CA. We have a weekly workshop in coordination with the Santa Cruz Public Library in the Downtown branch Life Literacy Center. Besides teaching intensive classes in creative writing, we also host Poetry Jams for the participants, and publish anthologies every year. We had our first spoken-word event, Inside Out Loud, in March 2025, and look forward to repeating that very successful event yearly. In 2024, we partnered with UCSC Department of Humanities to offer internships to students with special interest in our mission.
The William James Association, a 501c3 non-profit, is the fiscal sponsor of The Santa Cruz Poetry Project.
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Many participants have said they intend to continue writing and studying poetry after their release. One participant had his work published in a national journal, another had essays published in Catamaran. Another participant who only had a third grade education said he developed the confidence to sign up for classes at a junior college. Another was so deeply moved he wanted to know how he could give his children “poetry lessons” so he could share this deep experience with them. In July 2021, several of the students submitted poetry to be included in a week-long visual arts and spoken word festival in Lincoln City OR, "For the Seventh Generation." The poems included are highlighted in the Volume 12 anthology. Our "Inside Out Loud" event saw three former students reading their work as our Very Special Guests!
Please consider donating your time and/or treasure so we can continue this invaluable work with our incarcerated brothers and sisters. Your dollars would go toward teaching materials, paid teaching positions, and anthology printing costs. Your time would go toward teaching classes, or substituting for our regular staff of volunteers and paid teaching artists.
