Torch Literary Arts cut the ribbon on its first-ever physical space Tuesday, welcoming community members into the Torch Center in North Austin for the first time. The new brick-and-mortar home marks a major milestone for the nonprofit, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year after two decades of operating primarily as a digital magazine and event series supporting Black women and nonbinary writers.
The Torch Center sits within The Linc development in North Austin, near Sierra Club and Easy Tiger and directly facing Austin Community College Highland, according to The Austin Chronicle. Founder and executive director Amanda Johnston said a permanent physical space had become a community need, and the center is intended to support writers facing what she described as attacks and erasure in the humanities and creative arts, per the same report. Torch Literary Arts began in August 2006 as a self-funded online magazine that Johnston launched while working as a freelance web designer, spending her own savings to build a space for Black women writers when no local equivalent existed, according to Voyage Austin.
A Curated Bookshop and Event Space
The Torch Center includes a curated bookshop carrying poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles by Black women writers and other diverse and queer voices, the Chronicle reports. The nonprofit also plans to offer affordable event-rental space to creatives, writers, and other nonprofits, giving Torch a new physical outlet for programming it has long run through community partners, independent bookstores, and other cultural centers and spaces. The space is open to the public from noon to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, according to the same account.
Torch Literary Arts hosts dozens of empowerment-focused readings, writer's circles, and workshops each year, supporting writers from conception through publication. The organization now serves more than 16,000 annual digital visitors at TorchLiteraryArts.org, draws over 3,000 annual event attendees, and has published work by more than 200 writers, according to Torch Literary Arts.
A 20th Anniversary Conference and New Awards
Torch Literary Arts will host the inaugural Gathering of Flames conference from September 25-27, 2026, a three-day festival that the Chronicle describes as including writing sessions, panel conversations, readings, and the first annual Torch Awards. The organization selected the Austin Central Branch Library Special Event Center as the conference venue, with an all-day symposium and the inaugural Torch Awards Gala among the planned events, per Torch Literary Arts.
The newly launched Torch Awards will honor writers including Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Patricia Smith, Sharon Bridgforth, and Crystal Wilkinson in recognition of their contributions to the field, the Chronicle reports. Smith won the 2025 National Book Award, while both Griffiths and Wilkinson have won NAACP Image Awards, according to the same account. Bridgforth, also honored, works as a screenwriter and poet.
A Founder's Rise to State Poet Laureate
Johnston herself has emerged as a leading voice in Texas letters in the years leading up to the Torch Center's opening. She was named the 2024 Texas State Poet Laureate, becoming the 61st person and the first Black woman to hold the position in the honor's 92-year history, according to the Texas Observer. During her tenure, she spearheaded Praisesong for the People, a statewide project that commissioned 70 poets across seven Texas regions to write original praise poems for everyday Texans, with support from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.
Funding That Made the Brick-and-Mortar Leap Possible
The physical expansion follows a string of grants that have bolstered Torch's finances in recent years. The City of Austin Cultural Arts Division awarded the nonprofit a Thrive Grant in January 2025 to support local programming, marking the second time Torch received the award; Thrive grants typically range from $85,000 to $150,000 per recipient, per Torch Literary Arts. In January 2024, the organization also received support from The Black Fund, an Austin Community Foundation initiative directing more than $1 million over three years toward Black-led Central Texas nonprofits.
National recognition followed in June, when Torch was named one of 40 recipient organizations nationwide to receive an inaugural unrestricted general operating grant from the Literary Arts Fund, which distributed $7.7 million across 19 states to support literary publishers and community institutions, according to the Literary Arts Fund. That funding arrives against a backdrop of documented financial strain across the sector: a March 2025 field study titled Magnitude & Bond, published by the Cave Canem Foundation and Ithaka S+R, found that culturally specific Black literary organizations face systemic underfunding and operate on some of the most restricted budgets in the cultural sector. The study evaluated groups representing more than 140 years of combined service to Black writers.
With the ribbon now cut and the shelves stocked, Torch Literary Arts is positioning its North Austin storefront as both a retail destination and a working hub for the writers it has served online for two decades. The organization champions Black women and nonbinary writers in Austin and around the world, and its leaders say the Torch Center is meant to give that community a permanent place to gather in person.
