Meet our Grantee-Partner: Pen Parentis
Founder and executive director of Pen Parentis, MM De Voe, with Caroline Grant of the Sustainable Arts Foundation
Mission: We help writers stay on creative track after they have kids. Our core values are community, inclusivity, professionalism, and balance.
In 2008, Milda Motekaitis De Voe, who writes under the name M. M. De Voe, was living in New York City as a writer with two young children. She was looking for resources to help her complete her novel and secure a literary agent, but continued running into challenges, including assumptions about what kind of writer she should be. Along with another writer-parent, De Voe started the Pen Parentis After-Work Reading Series featuring successful authors who were also parents. After reading series participants expressed a desire for an organization for writer-parents, De Voe founded Pen Parentis, which became a 501c3 nonprofit organization in 2014. The reading series kept growing, and made it on the Time Out New York Critics’ Pick “99 things to do in NYC before you die" in 2017. It also appeared in the New Yorker and New York Times around the same time.
Pen Parentis’s programs, both online and in-person, offer resources to writers of all genres who are also parents to help them secure inspiration, funding, accountability, stability, energy, community and the many other essentials for a successful career in creative writing. They include the following:
- An annual writing fellowship that awards $2,000 to a parent of a child under 10 to advance their writing career. The fellow also receives a year of mentorship and the opportunity to read their winning story online at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon. Their winning story is published in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine and included in the annual Dreamers Writing Anthology. A second prize and third prize receive $500 and $250, respectively, and are invited to join Pen Parentis’ Cycle of Support.
- The Cycle of Support, a membership program that includes mentorship and weekly accountability groups for parents seeking a community of like-minded creative thinkers.
- The Pen Parentis Literary Salon, a monthly digital engagement during which three successful writers who are parents speak with two writer-parent moderators with the opportunity for audience questions and conversation. The salons are offered free with a suggested donation of $10 for those who can afford to help sustain Pen Parentis’ programming.
Writers in a Pen Parentis Cycle of Support virtual meeting celebrating Kristin Vukovic's novel.
Receiving a spring 2023 Poetry Programs, Partnerships, and Innovation grant was seminal in allowing Pen Parentis to initiate a five-year plan to increase its online capacity and outreach. It facilitated adding new poets, including three Native American poets, to the literary salon lineup. Audiences have responded positively to increased poetry programming with growth in attendance and engagement. The grant also allowed executive director De Voe to begin forging alliances with long-established poetry institutions in New York City, including Poets & Writers and Poets House.
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