For more than 25 years, Carolyn Holbrook has worked to encourage and promote writing, writers and spoken-word artists in neighborhoods and communities where opportunities were slim.

Now the writing community is thanking her. On Thursday, Holbrook was named the 2010 Kay Sexton Award winner and will be honored April 17 at the 22nd annual Minnesota Book Awards gala event.

"I was very surprised," Holbrook said Thursday. "I'm also flabbergasted and excited. I'm the first person of color who has won the Kay Sexton Award, and I'm really honored."

Holbrook founded the Whittier Writers' Workshop in 1979 and served as director until 1986, developing the first mentor program for black writers in the Twin Cities. She has served as program director for the Loft Literary Center and education coordinator at the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, developing a program to bring writers into schools.

In 1993, she founded SASE: The Write Place, an organization that was dedicated to bringing the literary arts to a diverse community -- rich, poor, suburban, urban, white, people of color, gay, straight, single parents, prisoners, and students. SASE merged with Intermedia Arts in 2006, but many of its original programs continue.

Holbrook's quiet passion for words stems from her own life; she founded the Whittier workshop when she was a single mother of five, working as a freelance secretary. "It's about helping people find their voice, helping them realize their own power through developing that voice of theirs," she said. "I would say that writing and knitting saved my life. I want to offer to other people what saved me."

Holbrook has also been involved in the Minnesota Book Awards, Rain Taxi Review of Books, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and many other organizations. She teaches at Hamline University and Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

The Kay Sexton Award is sponsored by the St. Paul bookstore Common Good Books and honors a person who has been dedicated to fostering books, reading and literary activity in Minnesota. Previous winners include Patrick Coleman, acquisitions librarian of the Minnesota State Historical Society; Emilie Buchwald, publisher and founder of Milkweed Editions and Gryphon Press, and David Unowsky, former owner of Ruminator Bookstore.

Laurie Hertzel • 612-673-7302