The Chicago Network for Justice and Peace assists individuals and organizations in their efforts to promote literacy and the use of the literary arts for creating effective communication between and among cultures and groups within cultures; in doing so, we seek to foster community building and the common cause for justice and peace.

To fulfill its mission, CNJP supports:

• Volunteer tutoring programs in schools and in prisons;
  
• Cross cultural literary conferences;
  
• Collaboration with International PEN’s International Women Writers Committee, Linguistic Rights Committee, Writers in Prison Committee;
  
• Library development;
  
• Collaborative publication projects;
  
• Literacy programs;
  
• Collaborative artistic projects involving the literary arts;
  
• Scholarship programs for students of merit who would otherwise be denied appropriate education for financial reasons.

To view the current list of projects, please see our Service Program.

Mexico, like all of Latin America, suffers from being overly centralized. Over-centralization has been blamed for Mexico’s underdevelopment, inflation and almost every other economic evil; it is also responsible for problems in the literary world. For as long as anyone can remember, almost all the publication, attention, sales, distribution, critical notice and publicity for literature have been concentrated in the capital. If you wanted to write, you had to go to the capital. Yet not everyone can.

There are places which do not exist, have no point of intersection, no latitude or longitude, and cannot be found in any atlas. We know some of these places better than places that exist. We all travel through the nonexistent worlds of Gulliver, Oz and Wonderland. In our minds we can see the hole next to the tree in Alice's country, the beach which Gulliver found peopled by dwarves or the emerald atmosphere of Oz. Like the imaginary worlds, the maps of our childhood and the memories of the places we dream of can be more vivid than any place in the material world.

The San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program focuses on students who do well in school and want to continue their education but cannot for economic reasons. Such scholarships have proven themselves effective for enabling students to pursue their educational goals and for improving the general economic and social situation of their families. Please contact Pat Perrin or Wim Coleman at wim.pat@gmail.com, for detailed information about the program and the students. Checks in support of this program should be made out to Chicago Network for Justice and Peace and mailed to:

1132 W. Lunt #3B
Chicago, IL 60626