
The Campaign for Literary Arts was the largest capital campaign for our 40-year-old organization, raising $22.5 million in support of a new permanent headquarters and the future Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. Literary Arts announced the successful completion of the campaign in February 2025 after launching the public phase of the campaign in April 2024.

The new Literary Arts headquarters, located in Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District, opened in December 2024, and is a vibrant hub for the community, with a main floor independent bookstore, classrooms for workshops and seminars, a podcast studio, staff offices, flexible event space, and a café coming soon. The historic building, renovated pro bono by partners Bora Architecture & Interiors and Edlen & Company, is named The Susan Hammer Center at Literary Arts after a transformative $3 million gift from the Susan Hammer estate that allowed for Literary Arts to purchase the building in cash.
“Creating an inclusive and welcoming center for our community, where people can gather to tell and hear stories and exchange ideas freely, has long been our dream. Susan’s gift, and the generosity of many other donors, enabled us to purchase the building outright, continuing our investment in Portland, a city that has been our home for four decades.” — Andrew Proctor, executive director of Literary Arts. “

The Campaign for Literary Arts drew support from a diverse range of individual donors, foundations, state and local government, and corporate sponsors whose generosity will help to sustain Literary Arts’ core mission to engage readers and writers of all ages, for decades to come. In addition to Bora Architecture & Interiors, Edlen & Company, and the Susan Hammer estate, other key contributors include Ginnie Cooper and Rick Bauman, Joan Cirillo and Roger Cooke, Jan and Steve Oliva, Theodore and Nancy Downes-Le Guin, Josie G. Mendoza and Hugh Mackworth, The Standard, and Priscilla Bernard Wieden, in memory of Dan Wieden. Individual community members contributed to the campaign, with 57% of the gifts received under $1,000 and an average gift of $245.
Throughout the process, Literary Arts committed to ensuring its campaign and the building of its new space reflected its existing equity framework, and that its new headquarters expressed those values in the physical space. As a result of its commitment to environmental, design, and economic justice goals, 35% of total capital project spending went to BIPOC owned firms, with an additional 15% going to minority, women-owned, and emerging small businesses. Additionally, the project removed all fossil fuels from the historic building, investing in an all-electric system with rooftop solar panels to be installed.

In addition to the organization’s new permanent headquarters, the campaign will fund the new Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency in the former home of one of Portland’s most celebrated literary figures. The residency will provide writers with an opportunity to focus on their craft in a calm, supportive environment. The residency is open to writers of all genres with a mission to cultivate diverse voices in the literary world, just as Le Guin did throughout her life.
It’s fitting that we launched this new chapter as we celebrated our 40th anniversary because it would not be possible without the visionaries and leaders that helped establish and grow Literary Arts over the past four decades.
Read The Campaign for Literary Arts Case for Support:
Literary Arts was primarily established in the years between 1984 and 1994 (see pages 9–10 of our Case for Support). It was a time when our region was not known as a cultural center or a community with the global outlook it has today. The work to establish Portland Arts & Lectures and the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts was visionary because these organizations helped create a new identity for us, an identity deeply invested in stories, ideas, and the people who dream them up. This work, alongside the work of other cultural organizations, is what opened the doors of possibility for a community to imagine a new future at a time when we were reeling from industrial collapse.
Today, the same opportunity is before us. The answers to our many challenges we face will be found in the stories we tell, the ideas we share, in the artists and visionaries we choose to listen to and honor. The Campaign for Literary Arts is a $22.5M investment to create new space for our community to dream, and imagine our future, to get informed, to connect, and to be engaged by stories from around the globe right here at home in Portland, OR.