Coastal Literary Arts Movement (CLAM) is a diverse group of Coastside residents who share a love of language, literature, the spoken word, and our coastal communities. Our mission is to encourage bilingual journalism and literary appreciation, connect people of diverse cultural groups with one another, and unlock the beauty of words for everyone on the San Mateo County coast.
CLAM is a young organization that is actively reaching out to the coastal communities to learn where we will have the most benefit. We work with our local newspapers, school district and community organizations to reveal the power of words to educate, inspire, enjoy and connect. We have sponsored a wide variety of endeavors that celebrate the Coastside through the written & spoken word such as collaborative journalism projects, high school poetry contests, and funding a locally produced bilingual film.
In the spring of 2021 CLAM was invited to collaborate with the City of Half Moon Bay’s post-pandemic economic recovery initiative, Make It Main Street, a series of 1st Thursdays events designed to elevate the arts and culture in Half Moon Bay. CLAM underwrites and participates in Speakers’ Space, where local writers, poets, journalists are invited to read their works, or works that inspire them, to an engaged audience. To date Speakers’ Space has hosted speakers reading in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Portuguese, Italian and Zapotec, an indigenous language common to many of the Coastside’s farmworker families. The 2022 series introduced the community-sourced poem project. Posters with a prompt of the month are placed in strategic locations throughout the community where residents and visitors are invited to jot down their response to the prompt of the month on a post-it. The individual comments are collected and collated into that month’s poem, read from the main stage at the close of Speakers’ Space. The monthly poem beautifully captures the zeitgeist of the moment, and is published on Makeitmainstreethmb.org
Visit Our Website: https://coastallit.org/
