A Night of Change! Meet our 2026 Honorees & Mentee Presenters

Five Generations of Writers in Conversation at DVF for the Girls Write Now Awards

October 1, 2026 – New York, NY

At the 2026 Girls Write Now Awards at Diane von Furstenberg’s studio, we paid homage to the feminist heroes who created the conditions for us to thrive, celebrated the honorees who have shaped the culture around us, and watched the next generation of leaders take flight.

Girls Write Now spans five generations, and at the Awards we were all in conversation. A mentor hands down what she knows. A mentee hands back what she sees. And what passes between them becomes a story, a career, a life a family never thought possible—a community transformed.

Girls Write Now Teacher-in-Residence Kayla Dudley opened the night with her poem “we were never just writing.” Kayla is a mentee, the founder of healotry, a project about healing through poetry, a student in the MFA program at The New School, and, as of this month, a published author in If Women Ruled the World from HarperOne.

Founder and Executive Director Maya Nussbaum then paid homage to the icons we lost: Gloria Steinem, without whom there would be no Girls Write Now; Dolly Parton, whose Imagination Library put books in the hands of millions of children; Agnes Gund, who founded Studio in a School and invested in Girls Write Now year after year; and Helen Ghiradella, the biologist who discovered how the structures in a butterfly’s scales turn light into color, and to whom this year’s anthology, Metamorphosis, is dedicated.

These are the trailblazers who opened doors. Then we honored two women who walked through them. Board Chair Judith Curr introduced Randee St. Nicholas, the photographer and director who has revealed the beauty of icons from Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston to Stevie Nicks and Prince, and whose new book is from without… and from within. Our 2024 honoree R.F. Kuang introduced Liate Stehlik on video. As CEO and Publisher of US Trade at HarperCollins, Liate has brought books into the world from The Magician’s Nephew and Wicked to Babel and Yellowface. Judith then sat down with both honorees for a fireside chat on mentorship, change, and the spaces young people need to create.

Then the mentees took the stage. Jayla Hall Cabrera published her book Greenville at 19. She spoke about overcoming what she calls an urban legend: the fear that creatives are running out of time. “Girls Write Now makes it known that there is no rush for time through its community,” she said. She credited her mentor, Michelle, who “shows up for me even in her own full-time career.” This February, Jayla launches Scared of Getting Older, an intergenerational writing workshop that brings young people into conversation with the elders in their community. She also shared a line from her poem “Soulful,” published in Metamorphosis: “To be of nothing, I looked in the vastness and gave myself reason, I am not nothing.”

Mariam Faisal, a student at Macaulay Honors College, spoke about Give Us Space. She co-wrote the white paper on third spaces, public transit, and mental health with fellows from across STARS organizations, and she is now bringing it to City Council. “It’s incredibly hard for my generation to find a third space that doesn’t require us to spend money to stay there,” she said. For Mariam, Girls Write Now has been that space, both online and in our 37th Street headquarters. “I truly don’t know what I’d do without the spaces that Girls Write Now has built for all the incredible women I’ve had the honor of speaking to and collaborating with.”

Ilana Drake closed out the night. She came to Girls Write Now at 15 through her grandmother, the feminist and political science professor Rebecca Lubetkin, at a time when she felt she had no place where she was understood. “I still remember my first time in the Girls Write Now office,” she said. “I soon realized this was a space where young women uplifted each other. I shared with other mentees that I had been cyberbullied during my first year of high school. I was met with kindness when I was vulnerable.” With her mentor, Erica Drennan, Ilana went on to publish in Ms. at 17. She continued in YR Media, The 74, The Forward, Insider, and The Tennessean. Today she is a second-year analyst at a financial firm in New York City, where she brings her colleagues into Girls Write Now as mentors.

That metamorphosis happens every day in the Girls Write Now Collaboratory, our home where writers of all ages, backgrounds, and persuasions connect and create across genres, media, and disciplines. The Awards kick off our year-end appeal, and your gift funds the people, programs, and platform that make the Collaboratory run. Give in honor of Kayla, Jayla, Mariam, and Ilana, and thousands of their peers.

Thank you to Diane von Furstenberg, who has hosted us at DVF Studio for almost a decade, so that every dollar raised goes to the programs. Thank you to our lead sponsor HarperCollins, and to Macmillan, NBCUniversal, and Raymond James. Thank you to Penguin Random House, which produced Metamorphosis. And thank you to Lena Dunham, for our writing contest and for the memoir in every gift bag.