It’s that time of year again!
In honor of #GivingTuesday, we’re waiving our submission fees on Tuesday, December 2, so you can donate your money or time to your favorite organizations. If you’re looking for recommendations, here are some of our favorite orgs we recommend donating your dollars to or getting involved with as a volunteer.
KCRW
KCRW is a nonprofit public media station. Donations support music discovery, NPR and local news, culture coverage, and community events. For arts-focused readers, KCRW’s Art Insider newsletter, helmed by arts writer Carolina Miranda, is an essential resource for anyone interested in the art world. At a time when many journalism arts organizations are facing funding cuts, subscribing, reading, sharing, and supporting trusted outlets like KCRW helps sustain the cultural ecosystems they serve.
Donate here.
LAist
LAist is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that is also home to L.A.’s largest NPR station broadcasting at 89.3 FM. Many in our Expo family were deeply affected by the Palisades and Altadena fires earlier this year. With the internet and phone service unavailable for updates, LAist 89.3 (formerly KPCC) was the go-to reliable, emergency radio. In addition, LAist is a valuable free news outlet for Southern California that we’ve always loved its focus on arts.
Donate here.
PS. Bonus shout-out to WatchDuty as well! An amazing resource that many turn to for real-time wildfire alerts. Donate here.
PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud program
DREAMing Out Loud is a paid, tuition-free creative writing workshop series for migrant writers. DREAMing Out Loud welcomes writers from all immigrant communities and backgrounds, both citizens and noncitizens. By providing community and professional support to the next generation of immigrant writers, the program seeks to counter anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and to amplify the voices of many living in this country who are marginalized because of their immigration status. At a time when immigrants are being attacked, the DREAMing Out Loud program gives voice and space to this vulnerable community, allowing them to tell their stories and hopefully humanizing their experiences via storytelling.
Donate here.
PlayGround
A longtime friend of Expo, PlayGround is a playwright incubator and theater community hub in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago that’s served as home to not only several of our past Stage & Screen contributors—including Matt DeNoto, Lena Ford, Ruben Grijalva, Arthur Keng, Jonathan Kuhn, Garret Jon Groenveld, Uma Incrocci, and Vincent Terrell Durham—but some of our editors as well. Each month from October through March, PlayGround’s pool of writers has four days to write on a topic, ranging from “In Disguise” and “Give and Take” to “Child’s Play: Adapted Nursery Rhymes” and “Not So ‘Silent Night’: Plays Inspired by Holiday Songs.” Out of that pool, six plays are selected to be performed the following weekend. It’s a brilliant model: the truncated timeline encourages playwrights, directors, and actors out of their comfort zones and explores new work. During the pandemic, these performances moved online. In the new “normal,” they are live-online hybrids with free admission. With auxiliary programs for full-length plays and directing apprenticeships, PlayGround has facilitated hundreds of plays and is a priceless resource for the theater community.
Donate here.
Women Who Submit
For more than a decade, Women Who Submit has supported and encouraged women and nonbinary writers to submit their work to literary journals by clarifying the submission and publication process. What began as a six-woman submission party around a kitchen table has grown into a network of monthly gatherings around the country and the world, as well as free quarterly online workshops, summer workshops for members, and print anthologies.
You can donate to Women Who Submit, now a 501(c)3 nonprofit, here.
WriteGirl
For years, Expo has been hosting publishing workshops inviting Los Angeles high school students and alumni from WriteGirl, so this recommendation should be no surprise! WriteGirl is a Los Angeles-based creative writing and mentoring organization that promotes creativity, critical thinking, and leadership skills to empower teen girls and gender-expansive youth. The organization pairs teens with professional women writers for one-on-one mentoring and puts on monthly writing workshops, as well as helps 100% of its seniors get into college. Meanwhile, WriteGirl publishes its very own lit journal called Lines & Breaks and a creative writing journal!
Donate here, or buy a Care Kit to be shipped directly to a WriteGirl teen!
Z Space
Z Space is a nonprofit performance venue located in an old can factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. It lives on a wide, quiet street that feels like the nave of a Catholic Church that makes walking up to Z Space’s entrance a religious experience.
This space makes a variety of initiatives dedicated to supporting artists, theater companies, and access to theater and literature happen. Some of these include New Work, a program that assists artists and ensembles in developing innovative works; Word for Word, a company that stages works of literature verbatim; and Youth Arts, an arts education program.
The Z Space website is the authority, but we can attest to the wonder that is a Word for Word staging, having attended The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. Upon entrance, we were not only “greeted” by a terse (hence the quotation marks) librarian but also given a book to “check out” and a library card with which to do that. Before exiting, we returned our books, having just “read” the story, and were each given a donut hole before being left to our own devices.
That’s all to say, Z Space is a great organization doing cool (understatement) things for theater and literature. Organizations like it need our support.
Donate here.
Bookshop
While it’s not a nonprofit, Bookshop.org is the indie lit community’s response to Amazon’s predatory practices and a fantastic way to support your local bookstore. Since 2020, Bookshop has provided more than $34 million to independent bookstores and literary organizations. Unlike Amazon oand other e-commerce stores that remove indie bookstores completely, Bookshop offers the same wide selection and similar pricing, but a percentage of those profits go directly to local bookstores. You can choose for your percentage to go towards the pool of all indie lit orgs, or directly to a bookstore if they are signed up as an associate.
You’ll find many of the recommended organizations on Bookshop (including Expo)!
Exposition Review
Want to support the work of our editors and contributors? Why not donate to Exposition Review? We’re a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, which means your donations are tax deductible and go directly into our programming—including our workshops for adult and teen writers, paying authors for our annual issue, and more!
Donate here.