The Door’s Always Open: A Reading and Celebration of Community Writing Centers

Join the Writers House, Murphy Writing of Stockton University, and the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College for an #AWP22 off-site reading in celebration of the work of university-based community writing centers. 

This event takes place in-person at the Writers House, 305 Cooper Street, Camden, NJ 08102. All guests are expected to comply with university COVID safety protocols, including masking when not eating and drinking. 

Featured readers

Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain and A Hole to Breathe. Her work has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, has won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2023. Shawn is the co-owner of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc., a dance instructor at Halliday Dance, and a member of  the Langston Hughes Society and the poetry performance troupe, No River Twice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and an MFA from Rutgers-Camden. When she is not writing, dancing, or teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family and her lucky pit bull, Ross.

J. C. Todd is author of the award-winning books Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021) and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2018), as well as collaborative artist books. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and twice a finalist in Poetry Society of America contests, she holds fellowship awards from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Night Heron Barks, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. 

Tyler Mills, poet and essayist, is the author of City Scattered (winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), as well as Hawk Parable (winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, SIU Press 2013), and Low Budget Movie (co-authored with Kendra DeColo and winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, released last year). She is also the author of an in-progress essay manuscript, The Bomb Cloud, winner of a 2021 Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC Literature Grant. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She teaches for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, is Founding Editor of The Account, and lives in Brooklyn.