It’s Giving Tuesday and there is no better day to show your support for Girls Write Now. For 20 years Girls Write Now has been mentoring underserved young women to find their voices through the power of writing and community. Please Give Write Now.
Historically, women authors have had to fight to be heard — or they had a mentor or champion helping them do so — ensuring that their work would see the light of day.
Imagine if these women authors didn’t persist…
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was rejected 12 times. When the book was finally picked up, publishers demanded Rowling go by her initials because they were worried young boys wouldn’t read a story written by a woman. Today, the Harry Potter series has sold over 450 million copies.
Zora Neale Hurston: It wasn’t until Alice Walker wrote about her search for Hurston’s grave for Ms. Magazine that Hurston’s work was revived, with Their Eyes Were Watching God selling 75,000 copies in its first month of reprint and eventually being named as one of the top 100 best English-language novels by Time Magazine.
Octavia Butler: When Butler was first starting out, she woke up at 2 a.m. every day to write before going to work at a variety of jobs, including a telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher. Despite her long work days, Butler was barely able to make ends meet, and her fourth novel, Kindred, was rejected by multiple publishers before she was given a $5,000 advance. Butler became the first science fiction author to be awarded the coveted MacArthur Genius Grant in 1995.
The next J.K., Zora or Octavia is in our midst right now — honing her skills with her Girls Write Now mentor, sitting side by side with fifty other potential Alices in our Saturday workshops, and counting down the paragraphs and pages until she has the next bestseller or piece of viral journalism in her hands. Donate now, and help it make its way from her hands to the world’s.