The National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest have partnered for the past two decades for a reading initiative. This project highlights shared reading experiences. Yvonne Boose follows up with a Princeton organization who received a grant for the 2025-26 NEA Big Read.
Midwest Partners, a nonprofit that promotes community engagement, chose the book “You are Here – Poetry in the Natural World” an anthology edited by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón for this cycle. The theme was “Our Nature.”
Kayla Greenwell is with Midwest Partners. She said the organization held a zine making class as one of the activities. Zine is short for magazine.
“They started as fanzines,” she explained. “People who are fans of work would make these little zines. It's sort of grown throughout, but it's always about the power of, like, the literacy of the community and getting information out to the community unfiltered.”
She said people who never wrote poetry before are now poets. One was novelist Jannifer Powelson.
“Who has 12 conservation-themed murder mystery novels," she said. "And she's like, I've never written a poem, I don't know what I'm doing, but by the end of it, she came out with something like really nice.”
Other gatherings included nature walks and poetry readings.
Greenwell said one of the walks served as a healing experience for her.
“Being in a like hyper commercialized transactional world," she said, "and then spending like a morning slash afternoon with a bunch of people making things and talking about our worries and doing some writing, going back and like thinking and listening to Ada, because all of this is basically because of her.”
The purpose of this initiative was to get people to read but Greenwell said it created a few writers.
An anthology will be put together from some of the writings, but everyone can take part. A solicitation will be put out in the fall.
The 2026-27 Big Read theme will be centered around America250.
