Literacy Grantees Impact Arkansas, Nation; 2026 Grant Program Now Open

The Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC), the signature program of the Brown Chair in English Literacy, awarded $88,194 in grants to Arkansas and national literacy organizations, educators, researchers and advocates. The funded projects commenced in fall 2025 and are scheduled to complete their funded work by early summer 2026. 

"Since joining the CLC in August of last year (2025), I've been blown away by the impact our community partners have through their work in Arkansas and beyond. In a time when access to education and literacy is being threatened and opportunities are scarce, they are providing essential resources and doing the work to ensure learning, creativity and community engagement continue," said Julia Jensen, associate director of the CLC and assistant to the Brown Chair in English Literacy. "The 2025 cohort of CLC grantees provide hope when hope seems to be in short supply, and it is inspiring to see their passion and dedication."

The CLC was founded in May 2022 by Eric Darnell Pritchard, the Brown Chair in English Literacy, director of the CLC and associate professor of English at the U of A. Currently, the CLC is entirely funded by the Brown Chair in English Literacy, established in March 2003 with generous funds given by The Brown Foundation of Houston, Texas, and matching funds from the Walton Family gift. Currently, the center has a staff of two full-time and three part-time employees who support the full slate of monthly programs including writing workshops, seminars, book clubs, lectures, symposia, grants and The Sandbox Journal.

For 2025, the pool of applicants for the literacy programming grant was especially competitive. As a result, following a comprehensive review by the selection committee, almost the entirety of the funding was awarded via the Seed and Growth branch of the grants program, which supports new or continuing literacy programs and initiatives such as organizations, book clubs, libraries, teachers, school counselors and workshops that promote or enhance literacy learning and development in community and/or collaborations. A smaller portion went to support Literacies Research grants, though this, too, received several highly competitive proposals. For both Seed and Growth and Literacies Research grants, priority is given to Arkansas-based individuals and organizations, though consistent with the Brown Chair's mission to have national impact, grant applicants in other states are eligible to apply as well.

 The CLC is pleased to announce the 2025 Seed and Growth and Literacies Research grant recipients.

2025 Seed and Growth Grantees

The Youth Advocate Resource Network (YARN), based in Mayflower, Arkansas, has received a grant to fund its second Arkansas Author's Children's Book Festival. Held in Conway, the free festival provides exposure to Arkansas writers and illustrators and interactive literacy activities in order to improve youth interest in reading and writing, and to improve literacy skills. The grant funds will be used to purchase books by Arkansas authors to give to youth free of charge; provide an honorarium for participating performing artists and illustrators; cover the cost of marketing, including printing, designing signage, advertising and providing volunteer T-shirts; and the cost of facility rental. This is the latest project in YARN's work to support Arkansan youth and families, which they have done for 41 years.

The Ozark Foothills Literacy Project (OFLP) serves Adult Literacy and English as a Second Language students and promotes family literacy in Sharp, Izard, Fulton, Stone and Independence counties. The CLC grant funds to OFLP will cover costs associated with a satellite English tutoring service to rural Arkansans and those for whom transportation to OFLP's main offices is cost prohinbitive; provide books, games, food and beverages for a free family literacy event; pay for professional items and personal printing to support outreach initiatives informing people of OFLP's free services; and provide partial funding for the program director's salary, which is imperative to continue to provide direct service to students and tutors across the five counties OFLP serves.

The Poetry Pop-Up Pictorgram is a free workshop geared toward providing youth with opportunities to explore poetry through the visual arts, thus supporting learning and development in reading, writing and visual literacies. Created by Angela Glass of Inspire with Angela, the grant funds will be used for facility rental, light refreshments, art and writing supplies, and a mdoest honorarium for visiting poets, visual artists and two workshop facilitators.

The Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), the state's largest public library system - serving approximately 11% of Arkansans - has been awarded a CLC grant to support literacy outreach efforts during its annual Six Bridges Book Festival. During the festival, visiting authors take part in the Writers In The Schools (WITS) program, going to Arkansas schools to provide a writing workshop to students. In total, 2,282 students attended WITS programs the previous year, in which the CLC was also a festival supporter. The grant will be used to purchase books that will be distributed to students free of charge during the festival but also at WITS programs held throughout the year.

The Springdale Public Library has been awarded a grant to sustain and support its Citizenship Corner, which provides learning resources to library patrons who are on the pathway to becoming United States citizens. Materials include study guides, vocabulary materials and other items in both English and Spanish to provide information about the process to become a United States citizen.

Book and Blooms: Growing Literacy Through Creativity, created by Arkansas author and illustrator Bienkuh Anwojue, is a children's literacy program designed to nurture children's reading comprehension and storytelling skills while fostering mental and creative growth. In the workshops, participants will read, illustrate and create their own stories, learning how to create their own book from start to finish. The goal is to build literacy confidence and lifelong interest in learning through an opportunity that imparts traditional skills through efforts focused on creativity and joy. The CLC funds will be used to create and print a custom-designed workbook that each child will take with them to support continued learning and reinforment of the tools learned in the program; provide free learning materials including books, sketchbooks and other necessary art supplies; provide a stipend to workshop facilitators; and community engagement efforts through literacy-themed exhibitions of the children's work shared with families, schools and other community members.

The NW2D Hair Salon, with locations in Fayetteville and Bentonville, operates a Black Girl Book Club. The program provides, free of charge, a space to celebrate literature, build community and foster meaningful discussions. Through this work, the club leverages literacy advocacy for individual and collective empowerment and cultural enrichment. The Black Girl Book Club began in 2024 with only four attendees, but rapidly grew to over 30 attendees, necessitating financial resources to accommodate this exponential growth. The CLC grant funds will be used to continue to provide free books to attendees, rent venues for meetings, outreach efforts to prospective attendees, refreshments for club meetings and a modest honorarium for authors to visit the club and discuss their book.

The El Paso (Texas) Aphasia Connection Center provides support and programming for people with aphasia, a medical condition when one has difficulty for their mental thoughts to connect to motor and physical activity and actions such as language comprehension, speaking, reading and writing. The American Brain Foundation estimates that approximately 2.4 million Americans live with aphasia. With a CLC grant, the El Paso Aphasia Connection Center will create and offer a bi-weekly Comics Story and Art Workshop for adult patients with aphasia in the El Paso/Las Cruces (New Mexico) borderland community, where participants create free and accessible digital comics about living with aphasia. The funds will be used to digitize those comics and make them available for free via a website; cover the cost of materials for writing and drawing activities; pay an honorarium to professional local comics creators and students studying speech pathology and occupational therapy to facilitate one-on-one writing and drawing lessons with people with aphasia; and rent a venue to hold a retreat-style location for the program.

Read Books! Because Braille Matters is a program of the National Braille Press. The organization empowers blind and visually impaired individuals through programming, materials and technology that support and enrich braille literacy learning through touch. The CLC grant will be used to support the introduction of braille and tactile literacy by providing free resource bags in English and Spanish to blind and visually impaired children and their families, focusing on children from birth to age 7 and children with Individualized Education Programs (IEP) up to age 10. With partner teachers in Arkansas and across several states, the program is positioned to leverage the resources of the grant to increase capacity for their work to meet greater demand.

2025 Literacies Research Grantee

Dr Jungmin Kwon (Michigan State University) has received a CLC Literacies Research Grant to support the research project "Partnering With Bilingual Youth to Affirm and Sustain Community Literacies." The project explores and supports bilingual families' language and literacies by co-designing and co-leading literacy workshops in collaboration with bilingual youth and public libraries. Through this research, Dr. Kwon seeks to expand knowledge and practice about family community literacies centered on bilingualism and biliteracy. The grant will fund venue/room rental fees, refreshments for workshops and meetings, T-shirts for participants and facilitators, and books for workshop facilitation and research.

"We at the CLC and Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy hope you will join us in congratulating the 2025 CLC Grant cohort and wishing these projects well. We also hope that you will encourage others in Arkansas (and beyond) to apply for grant funding for their literacy programs and research in our future grant cycles," Pritchard said.

The CLC is currently accepting proposals for the 2026 grant cycle until May 1, 2026. Decisions will be communicated to applicants in summer 2026. For more information on applying, check out the CLC's website here.

To support prospective applicants, Pritchard and Jensen will be available for brief appointments with prospective grant applicants on Wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings until March 18 to answer any questions about the grants program. These appointments are limited in number and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. If you wish to meet with the CLC team with questions regarding its grants program, please fill out this form, and a member of the team will reach out to confirm your appointment.