Founded as a 501c3 nonprofit in 2017, Ridgelines Language Arts provides expert language arts instruction to those who are underserved in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. We teach language arts—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.
Ridgelines Language Arts programs offer participants, many of whom are impacted by stigma and injustice, with ways to explore their voices and their stories, exercise their creativity, and advocate for personal wellbeing and social change. We offer these programs because we believe that healthy individuals and just social conditions are sustained by the reflection, honesty, pleasure, and intimacy fostered by the study of language arts.
Our work is four-fold:
We provide expert language arts instruction to those who are impacted by stigma and injustice in our region. Our programs—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—take place in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s rural youth centers, domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.
We design and publish broadsides, chapbooks, and zines that feature the work of our program participants. We share these publications through exhibitions at local libraries, coffee shops, community centers, store windows, museums, and other gathering spaces.
We create ways for our program participants to share their work through readings, performances, and other community events. We also occasionally host open writing workshops and fundraiser readings to benefit our core programs, and we partner with other organizations in our region to create informal ways for people from all walks of life to enjoy diverse language arts.
We bring the stories, poems, songs, and voices of our program participants to the central PA listening region and beyond through our podcast series, Use Your Words!
"As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action."
--Audre Lorde, "Poetry is Not a Luxury"
UPCOMING EVENTS
Join us for a day of exploring community language arts education.
This gathering is for artists, teachers, community builders, caregivers, students, poets, writers—for everyone curious about language arts in community spaces!
Registration is open! Learn more and register here.
Ongoing
We are happy to announce Blood Lines Monthly, a series of gatherings for women-identifying and nonbinary central Pennsylvanians to share stories, poetry, writings, and other language arts about reproductive experiences. These gatherings build on the community that has formed over the last two years of honoring, celebrating, and telling our truths about reproductive experiences through the Blood Lines events we've held in the fall of 2023 and 2024 and look forward to holding again in the fall of 2025.
Blood Lines gatherings will begin on Tuesday March 25th and will continue through 2025 monthly on Tuesdays from 7-8:30 PM. We welcome new voices, along with those who have experienced past Blood Lines programs. Workshop participants need not commit to performing in the Blood Lines event this coming fall in order to attend these monthly gatherings.
Imagination Club Poetry Poster Exhibition
Bellefonte Art Museum
Throughout 2025
We’re happy to announce that the Bellefonte Art Museum will be exhibiting a rotating selection of colorful poetry posters written by students in Ridgelines’ Art & Imagination Club. Beginning in September, collaborative poems celebrating the exuberant voices of Central Pennsylvania’s rural youth will be displayed along the walls leading up to The Makery at the Museum, a dedicated children’s art studio, housed on the second floor of BAM.
These poems were written over the past year and a half by participants in our Art & Imagination Club program in partnership with the Aaronsburg Civic Club. This weekly after-school program invites East Penns Valley youth to explore visual art, poetry, and nature, and the connections between the three. We hope you'll stop by and enjoy their words!
NEWS
In autumn of 2024, Ridgelines was named as one of 112 ArtsHERE grant recipients nationwide. ArtsHERE was an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with South Arts and in collaboration with the other five U.S. Regional Arts Organizations. Although this program was discontinued by the new administation in spring of 2025, Ridgelines was honored to have recieved ArtsHERE support from October 2024 through May 2025.
Being Heard poems win first prizes at Grange Fair
We’re very happy to announce that our Being Heard creative writing group won first prize for both of the poems they entered in the Grange Fair senior crafts competition last summer! These entries were a true group effort, with poems written collaboratively by Being Heard members and then illustrated by other talented residents at Centre Care. Pictured above is proud Being Heard teaching artist Abby Minor visiting the prize-winning poems at the Fair.
Accessibility Information & Resources:
If there are technologies or services that would make any of our events more accessible for you or someone you know—for example large print materials, audio descriptions, or sign language interpretation—please let us know! You can submit accommodation requests at any time to RidgelinesLanguageArts@gmail.com. We are more than happy to provide these and other services upon request.
Many thanks to our 2024-2025 Community Business Sponsors
