About

Our Mission / Vision

The Notebooks Collective is a virtual literary arts space focused on community, connection, and continued learning.

We believe that creative work is vital in our society, that creatives should be paid for their time and talent, and that learning is a lifelong, evolving endeavor.

We believe in growing with our community, meaning that as our community’s needs evolve, our offerings do too. Our base offerings include readings, in-conversation events, and gatherings that focus on generating new work and submitting finished pieces for publication. Goals include supporting a wide roster of writers who offer in-conversation events and readings, seminars and classes, community connection events to foster relationships, a writer-in-residence program and artist-in-residence program, book club(s), mentoring programs, and more.

We aspire to connect writers and creatives with other writers and creatives who are further along the writing path and willing to share what they’ve come to learn and understand about how we all move in the literary world. We believe in helping to amplify voices that often go unnoticed and strive to create a community that values, respects, and uplifts one another.

Founders

Rebecca Connors

Rebecca Connors’ (she/her/hers) poems can be found in Glass, Rogue Agent, Lily Poetry Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She lives with her family in Boston, where she received her MFA at the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. Her poems have been nominated for the Orison Anthology and the Pushcart Prize.

Her chapbook manuscript, Split Map, won the Dare to Speak Chapbook Contest and was published by Minerva Rising Press in Spring 2019.

Along with her writing and studying, she is a digital consultant who helps non-profits, artists, and others with their online communications needs. She serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club as Communications Chair and as web editor for the Lily Poetry Review. She has too many plants and a weakness for regency romances, horror stories, and medieval art. Her favorite notebook is the Moleskine hardcover.

Lisa Allen

Lisa Allen (she/her/hers) fell in love with poetry at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, where she’d traveled from her home in Kansas to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction—and then, during each night’s readings, closed her eyes and listened to the poetry of Meg Kearney, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Nicole Terez-Dutton, and Randall Horton (and countless other guests and fellow students). It was there that she began to understand that poetry is both singular and communal—and it was there that she realized that Lucille Clifton was right when she said, “Poetry is a matter of life, not just of language.”

Lisa’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now (Putnam, 2015), The Bacopa Literary Review (2018 and 2019, discussed here by Editor Kaye Linden), the anthology Feckless Cunt (World Split Open Press, 2018, read by Susan Rukeyser on the podcast Desert Lady Diaries), Midway Journal (2019), Lily Poetry Review (2019), 3Elements Review (2019), Dine: An Anthology (Books by Hippocampus, 2020), and December Magazine (2020). She volunteers at VIDA as a Creative Nonfiction reader. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Midway Journal in 2019.

She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the Solstice Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College, where she was a Michael Steinberg fellow in Creative Nonfiction. She works as a librarian and as a freelance editor and writer, teacher, and speaker. Lisa lives in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. Her (current) favorite notebook is the Midori A6 size, dot grid.