Girls Write Now is a nationally award-winning nonprofit, media incubator, and multi-generational community. For nearly three decades, we have broken down the barriers of gender, age, race, and poverty to mentor, teach, and connect writers and leaders across disciplines and around the nation. With a focus on those historically disempowered due to their gender and gender identity, we harness the power of stories to shape culture, impact industries, and bridge worlds.
Girls Write Now Collaboratory Journeys
Become a Mentee or Mentor in a Fall 2026 Journey (November – January). Deadline is August 31.
Mentor, Write & Connect
Our doors are open to writers, thinkers, leaders, and dreamers of all ages, backgrounds, skill levels, and perspectives. Whatever you do, you write. Wherever you are, we’re here. This is home base to connect and create.
Engage Employees, Promote Talent, Publicize Campaigns
Join forces with us to elevate diverse talent across fields and industries. We welcome partnerships with community-based organizations, academic institutions, and companies big and small.
Donation Options for Individuals & Institutions
When you write, you can do anything. When you give, we can do everything. Invest in a 30 year tradition that transforms lives, shapes democracy, enriches industries, and heals the world.
Metamorphosis: Girls Write Now 2026 Anthology
To truly understand Girls Write Now, zoom out and observe a complex, multi-dimensional organism, constantly and consciously in the making. Its contours come into focus, and each word dissolves and evolves: Girls becomes a spectrum across gender, race, age, and poverty; Write spans genres, media, and disciplines; Now stretches across three decades and counting. Resolved into its component parts—G. W. N.—its very being refracts: a nonprofit, but also an incubator of art, a developer of professions, a community that heals. Made for writing and mentoring—and, in turn, for training, curating, and fortifying coalitions of artists, educators, and leaders. Rooted in New York City, branching outward: statewide, national, even global. Dubbed the Collaboratory: intimate, versatile, cutting-edge; designed to move with AI, a volatile marketplace, and our own psyches. For Girls Write Now, Metamorphosis is not only the title and theme of this anthology—it is a state of being.
Original Multimedia Featured in Our Monday Memo Newsletter
An Introvert’s Tale
As Elery adapts to her new job at the publishing firm, she looks back on her previous job at the local bookstore. The skills she gained stacking books may be more useful than she thought.
My project is a compilation of several of my poems narrated alongside many photographs from my nature collection. I find that there are endless possibilities when depicting the natural world and its challenges: stories, music, light and shade, color, and poetry, to name a few.
A darkly funny take on identity, ambition, and modern life. A mentee at Girls Write Now navigates cultural confusion, people-pleasing instincts, and the dream of running a country with empathy, practicality, and a little tyranny.
A poem on the constellations in our lives.
Upon Commenting on Social Media
Moving Up
The Wild Inside
The Journey into a Self-Proclaimed Funny Person's…
friendship
Read Me Closely: Lena Dunham's Famesick Story Collection
In partnership with Lena Dunham and Random House, Girls Write Now invited our community to write their way to wellness. We are proud to share the contest winners in a new story collection.
In her memoir Famesick, Lena Dunham asks herself a difficult question: What has the cost of fulfilling her dreams really been, and was it worth it? She discovers that while the fever of being seen by the world can make us feel famesick—fragmented, exhausted, or lost—there is a deeper, more lasting relief found in writing. Inspired by Lena’s book, the mentees of Girls Write Now write about the state of internal reconnection that happens when we learn to live with what we cannot change, turn our regrets into wisdom, and return to what, and who, we love.
Corporate Partners
In The News
Kirkus Reviews Praises Girls Write Now’s Forthcoming Anthology, Metamorphosis
Kirkus Reviews Describes Metamorphosis: Girls Write Now 2026 Anthology as Sincere Engagement and Effort.
Mentees Envision Their Future at NBCUniversal’s Career Inspiration Camp
As a student coming from California coming to this camp was a great way to get exposure in the media
New York City Poetry Festival Features Girls Write Now Poets & Performers
Join four mentees for an afternoon of poetry on identity, resistance, and coming of age. Girls Write Now takes the Youth Stage at The New York City Poetry Festival on Sunday, July 19 at 2 PM. The 15th Annual Festival takes place at Nolan Park on Governors Island—this will be the second time our mentees grace the Poetry Festival stage. Registration is free—all you need is the $2.75 ferry fare. We look forward to seeing you there!
From Solitude to Love and Longing: What Our New Mentees Are Reading This Summer
We're Alone. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Stoner. And right beside them: The Henna Wars. Rose in Chains. Madonna in a Fur Coat. When we ask incoming mentees what they're reading, the stack runs the gamut—from solitude to love and longing, from a 1943 Turkish love story to a 2025 romantasy, with poetry and feminist theory in between.
Across Genres and Generations: What Our New Mentors Are Reading This Summer
Last week, we asked our incoming mentees what they've been reading. Now it's our new mentors' turn. Sula. The Dry Season. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. And right beside them: The One & Only Googoosh, Blood Over Bright Haven, The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli. From a 1973 American classic to a 2026 debut, from Iranian pop history to Palestinian memoir to romantasy—it's a summer reading adventure like none other. Enjoy!
Eames Institute Announces Girls Write Now Founder & Executive Director Maya Nussbaum a 2026 Honoree of the Curious 100.
Eames Institute Announces Girls Write Now Founder & Executive Director Maya Nussbaum a 2026 Honoree. The Eames Institute's Curious 100 is a celebration of one hundred courageous leaders and creative minds across the US who are harnessing the transformative power of curiosity to address today’s most pressing problems and shape the cultural conversations that define our moment.
Girls Write Now Partners with Tribeca Film Festival as Co-Host
Girls Write Now is Co-Hosting at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival!
Community Experiences
Upcoming Events
On Girls Write Now Events
Become a Mentor
Make Time.
It feels like there’s never enough time in the day, and that feeling only grows as we get older. But did you know that when you mentor at Girls Write Now, you get time back? Our community gives you more than you could ever imagine, including a new sense of how to live and give your best life.
