The Over-the-Rhine Community Writing Collaborative is a new partnership between Peaslee Neighborhood Center and Northern Kentucky University’s Department of English. While housed at Peaslee, the Collaborative promotes writing activities that honor and celebrate the voices of Over-the-Rhine residents and workers that have often been denied a space in public discourse and policy-making. The Collaborative brings together community residents, activists, students, academics, and social service workers, to sponsor, produce, and showcase writings that are representative of the neighborhood and its rich history in the making. The Collaborative seeks to include the formal membership of additional Over-the-Rhine community organizations moving forward.

The Over-the-Rhine Community Writing Collaborative is committed to:

• Active engagement between residents of Over-the-Rhine and community activists, students, academics, and social service workers through the sharing of diverse writing practices, resources and experiences for the benefit of all.
• Developing literacy skills in the process of engaging Over-the-Rhine residents to tell their own stories about the neighborhood, thereby creating documents resulting in a substantial historical archive of community experience.
• Informing and educating all citizens of Greater Cincinnati about the significance of Over-the-Rhine through writings that broaden and deepen the historical context in which our urban core’s contemporary political, social, and economic policies are crafted.
• Enhancing service, academic, and cultural programs in Greater Cincinnati through organized writing activities and collaboration.

For more information about the Over-the-Rhine Community Writing Collaborative, contact Chris Wilkey at wilkeyc@nku.edu or 513-498-4264