Our History

Deep Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was founded in 2008 to address the detrimental effects of poverty on literacy in Savannah, Georgia. During our first year, we hosted free creative-writing workshops for 24 young people from two local public schools and published one book of writing.

We currently work with over 800 youth locally and across Georgia, and more than 200 of teachers, adult artists, writers, and community stakeholders every year. Since our small beginnings in 2008, we have supported more than 5,000 young people with our free writing, arts, and leadership programs, and we’ve published more than 130 anthologies of youth and adult work, trained more than 400 local writing mentors, hosted live readings reaching diverse audiences of 15,000, and shared Savannah’s stories around the nation.

In November 2015, Deep traveled to the White House, where First Lady Michelle Obama personally awarded Deep Center a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award—the nation’s highest honor for organizations like ours.

While our key aim remains building learning and agency through the art of creative storytelling, we are continually deepening our practices, expanding our reach, and honing our strategies to best work with our communities and to make Savannah a more just and equitable place. We now work not just with youth but the village and systems surrounding young people, because young people’s healthy development cannot be separated from the context in which they live. Our learning spaces have become intergenerational and include parents, guardians, and other adults in our young people’s village, including community stakeholders, artists, workers inside the juvenile justice and educational ecosystem, and more. And our aim now is to lift up Savannah’s youth and families by directly supporting them while working to change the institutions and systems harming them.

Our Co-Founders

Catherine Killingsworth

Catherine Killingworth co-founded and was the first executive director of Deep Center. She earned a BA in English at Yale University, where she won the Curtis Prize, the Wright Prize for Nonfiction Writing, and the Seymour Lustman Price for Arts and Culture. She studied creative writing at Cambridge University as a Thouron scholar.

In 2008, Catherine founded Deep, alongside Hartford Gongaware (founding board chair), Emma Lunbeck, Alex Borinsky, and Chelsea Dye. In 2010, she authored The Cure for IDK, a book of writing lesson plans inspired by Deep’s first year of writing workshops. As Deep’s executive director for five years, Catherine became known affectionately around Savannah middle schools as “that writing lady.” In 2013, Catherine stepped down as executive director in order to serve as an education professional.

Hartford Gongaware

A native of Savannah, Georgia, Hartford Gongaware in 2008 teamed up with a Catherine Killingsworth and a group of local authors to co-found Deep Center, for which he was the board chair until 2015.

Hartford graduated from Princeton University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Gongaware was one of the founders of Silverpoint.Net, a web design company.

As a partner in the creative services firm Beautiful Hype, he now tells brand and product stories for companies nationwide. Mr. Gongaware’s work has been published in the Ontario Review and the Savannah Morning News, and online at Gutfire!