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 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 Advisory Board of the Solstice MFA Program and is the web editor for the Lily Poetry Review. She has too many plants and a weakness for regency romances, horror stories, and medieval art. She lives with her family and two cats in Maynard, MA. Her favorite notebook is the Moleskine hardcover.
Lisa Allen
Lisa Allen (she/her) is the author of It’s What I’ve Got Left (Lily Poetry Press). Her 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), December Magazine (2020), Pinch, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bear Review and MER, among others. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and was a 2022 Best of the Net finalist for her poem “Prolapse: Etymology,” published by South 85 Journal.
She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the Solstice Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lasell College, where she was a Michael Steinberg fellow in Creative Nonfiction. She works in a library and as a freelance editor and writer. Lisa lives in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. Her (current) favorite notebook is the Midori A6 size, dot grid.