Lauren Alessi, Assistant Director of the Community Literacy Center, is continuing in her third year at CSU. She began studying here in 2011, and is currently a master’s student in the Sociology department. Alessi shared her passion for the work that she does, and gave me more insight as to what the CLC does for the community.

What is your job position and current role at the CLC? I’m the assistant director of the CLC, so my role is to supervise the interns. We have four interns right now as well as the volunteers, and we have about 10 volunteers. I also research and apply for different grants because we are grant funded, and I do a lot of community outreach as well. We have publications that we put out each semester through our program, and so I’ll have people email me about the journals. We distribute them throughout the community and out of state.

What does your typical day of work consist of? A day at the office varies quite a bit. One of the main things we do is the “Speak Out Writing Workshop,” and that’s a weekly writing workshop that takes place at the jail. So some days there will be workshops going on, other days there are many meetings, or if there’s a grant due I’ll be working to get that together; there’s just a lot that goes on from week to week.

What is one of your favorite things about the CLC? One of my favorite things about the CLC is the community readings that we do each semester. Towards the end of the semester when the CLC publication comes out, we have community wide readings at the jail, and local coffee shops for the Turning Point groups. So the writers will share their work, and it has a poetry reading feel to it. With the jail readings, people from the community are allowed to come, and it’s a huge celebration of their work being published in the journal. It’s such a great event, and it’s cool to see them share the work that they’ve written.

Describe Eddy in one word. Traffic-jammed. [laughs]

Favorite book: It’s “The Age of Innocence”, by Edith Wharton. I just really love her voice, the way that she writes, and her kind of command of language; it’s really exciting for me.

Do you have any advice for English majors? Clear your bookshelves!

Please note: this edition of Humans of Eddy was originally published on the English Department’s Facebook page on March 13, 2014. Read more about this series.