A Writer's Guide to Santa Cruz, California

The Downtown Branch on Church Street is open daily, Sundays in the afternoon only.

The Live Oak Library Annex, at 979 17th Avenue, has three study rooms you can reserve free on the same day, an hour at a time, or for two hours running if no one else has booked. Library staff visit only part of the week, and there is no service desk. The annex is open weekdays, and the Live Oak Branch closes on Sundays.

Special Collections & Archives, on the third floor of McHenry Library, holds rare books and artists' books along with UCSC and local history. The general public can use it, as can visiting scholars. Set up an Aeon account first.

The museum's archive covers Santa Cruz County history, and its collection guides are online at archives.santacruzmah.org. Research visits are by appointment through archives@santacruzmah.org. During the weekly Open Archives hours you can step into the Archives Reading Room and meet the archivist.

Bookshop Santa Cruz is a large independent bookstore on Pacific Avenue, with new, used and sale books. It is open daily.

Bad Animal is a used and rare bookshop combined with a natural wine bar and bistro. The shop opens at midday, Wednesday through Sunday.

Gary and Denise opened Two Birds in late 2020 as a neighborhood bookstore on the Eastside. They stock new releases and used books, plus cards and gifts. The store closes on Wednesdays.

Atlantis has sold comics and graphic novels since 1976, and it keeps back issues. It won the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Award in 1996. The original shop appears in the 1987 film The Lost Boys.

Pacific Workplaces runs this downtown NextSpace location, with daily drop-in passes and flex-desk memberships. Coffee and tea are unlimited, and meeting rooms rent by the hour.

Cat & Cloud's café in Abbott Square, a downtown market of local restaurants, is open daily into the early evening. The roaster's other cafés close in mid-afternoon. For a full kitchen, go to the Swift Street headquarters.

Verve's Pacific Avenue café is open daily, a few doors from Bookshop Santa Cruz. The roaster runs three more cafés in Santa Cruz, one of them on 41st Avenue.

Lulu Carpenter's roasts its own coffee, and the Pacific Avenue café houses its bakeshop kitchen. It opens early and stays open into the evening, seven days a week. A second café is in Midtown.

The Crepe Place serves crepes and books shows on its Garden Stage and in the bar. It is open daily. The Monday-night open mic is free.

Kuumbwa presents jazz musicians from the region and well beyond it, and Cafe Kuumbwa serves dinner specials.

In the evening, Bad Animal's kitchen and natural wine bar open alongside the bookshop.

Catamaran is a Santa Cruz nonprofit that publishes a quarterly literary and visual arts magazine. It also runs a writing retreat and offers courses.

Wellstone, founded in 2013, is a small writers' retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, four miles from the Pacific. Its residencies include the Emerging Writer Residency and the California Fiction Residency. The Mary C. Curtis Fellowship gives African American journalists two weeks in residence to develop a book proposal. Wellstone Books is the center's own imprint.

Bookshop Santa Cruz brings national and local authors to read in its skylight room and at offsite venues. Many readings are free, The Hive Live! poetry series among them.

Family and friends started this free public reading in 2009 in memory of Morton Marcus, a Santa Cruz County poet who taught at Cabrillo College for more than three decades and hosted The Poetry Show on KUSP. The Humanities Institute has presented it since 2015. Several hundred people come each year, and past readers include Robert Hass and Natasha Trethewey.

The Humanities Institute is UCSC's hub for humanities research. It gives faculty and students time and resources through fellowships, and it helps scholars bring in outside funding. It also leads public events.

The library's Author Services guide covers copyright and open access, including the options for a dissertation or thesis. It also walks through the steps of the publishing process.

California Humanities is the state's affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It funds public humanities work through Connecting California Grants and the California Documentary Project.

Art Journal is the College Art Association's quarterly peer-reviewed journal, founded in 1941. It publishes scholarship and artists' writing that develop critical methods for understanding modern and contemporary art. Its editor-in-chief is a professor in UC Santa Cruz's History of Art and Visual Culture department. Preparing an article for Art Journal

Founded in 1973, Political Theory publishes work on contemporary and historical political thought, normative and cultural theory, and the history of ideas from a range of philosophical, ideological, and methodological perspectives. It is co-edited in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at the University of California, Irvine, and published by SAGE. Preparing an article for Political Theory

The California Arts Council's fellowship recognizes California artists in any art form, in three tiers from Emerging to Legacy. Santa Cruz County artists apply through Arts Council Santa Cruz County, which administers the six-county Central Coast region.

Create Grants fund arts and cultural projects in Santa Cruz County that are open to the public. Develop Quick Grants suit work that won't be shared publicly as part of the grant. County artists and arts organizations can apply, as can other groups working with artists.

The Commonwealth Club gives these annual awards to books by authors who live in California. Categories run from fiction and poetry to Californiana and contribution to publishing.

Catamaran gives this annual book prize to a West Coast poet. The winning collection is published, and the winner is featured in the magazine.

This page gathers grants and writing resources for UC Santa Cruz students.

Students at CSU Monterey Bay have a guide of their own.

Community Printers is a unionized worker collective that has printed in Santa Cruz since 1977. It prints books and magazines on offset presses and short runs digitally, and its bindery does hardcovers. The shop is open weekdays.

Sentinel prints offset and letterpress, and it handles finishing work such as foil and embossing. It also prints booklets and catalogs, and pickup and delivery are free.

Little Giant is an artist-run printmaking studio, with letterpress and risograph among its methods. It runs low-cost workshops and offers studio memberships. The collective keeps no regular hours, so use the contact form on its site to set up a visit. Its members take commissions, but the collective is unlikely to print for hire.