[photo credit: Red Hen Press]
The celebration, set for 3:30 p.m. at 12677 Glenoaks Blvd., marks the close of the Pasadena-based nonprofit’s Writing in the Schools program for the 2025-2026 school year. The program places distinguished authors into classrooms at low-income schools for hour-long weekly workshops over six consecutive weeks. At year’s end, every student receives a free, professionally bound anthology of their original writing.
The event is open to the public at no charge. Red Hen Press describes the anthologies as often the first books that participating students have personally owned, according to the organization’s published program materials.
Red Hen Press is headquartered at 1540 Lincoln Ave. in Pasadena, and the Tia Chucha event is the second of two back-to-back WITS celebrations this week. A Pasadena event takes place Wednesday, June 10, at 4 p.m. at Red Hen’s Lincoln Avenue offices and is supported in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.
Since launching the Writing in the Schools program in 2003, Red Hen Press says it has provided free workshops and books to more than 5,000 low-income students in grades 2 through 12 across the Los Angeles area, according to the organization’s website. As of 2024, the program serves approximately 300 students per year at four area schools.
The WITS program expanded from its original home at Crenshaw High School to reach schools in the Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Culver City school districts, according to Red Hen Press’s published description of the program. “WITS gives children and youth the chance to read and take home their own books of contemporary literature,” Gabriela Morales, then a publicity associate for Red Hen Press, wrote in published program materials. “…These two books are often the first books they’ve ever personally owned and open the door into a whole new world of cultural experiences.”
The Tia Chucha event is funded in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural is a nonprofit arts center and bookstore whose mission, according to its website, is to transform the Northeast San Fernando Valley community through ancestral knowledge, the arts, literacy, and creative engagement.
This year’s student poetry anthologies are available free at redhen.org/writing-in-the-schools.
Red Hen Press also offers a free creative writing summer camp, WITS HQ, for middle and high school students at its Pasadena offices in late July and early August.
“The program began in classrooms at Crenshaw High School and has since expanded to support schools in L.A., Pasadena, and Culver City School Districts,” Morales wrote in published materials describing the program’s history.
The student anthologies from the current year’s program, like those of every year since 2003, will be available for anyone to read free on the Red Hen Press website. The poems are already written. Thursday, the poets take the stage.
