On March 9, Linda Myers, the executive director of the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Loft Literary Center, announced that she will retire in October. The organization, whose mission is "to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers, and an audience for literature" by offering classes, competitions, grants, and residencies, was founded in 1974. The center will begin searching for Myers’s successor in late spring.
Myers began at the Loft in 1994 and was previously an English professor and director of the liberal studies graduate program at Hamline University in St. Paul. Some of her key initiatives include helping to raise $5.5 million dollars to renovate two downtown Minneapolis buildings to create Open Book, which houses the Loft and other literary organizations, such as Milkweed Editions and the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, and helping to launch the Talking Volumes regional book club in partnership with the Star Tribune newspaper and Minnesota Public Radio.
