九九云2025-outline

I have always been a believer in both giving and giving back, and I created the Elizabeth George Foundation to do both. I wanted to be able to give aspiring writers the opportunity to see if they could develop the discipline needed to complete a writing project during a year in which they would have full financial support, and I also wanted to return to the world of reading and readers something which I had long taken from it: the pleasure of sitting down with a book.  So those two intentions on my part ultimately became the Elizabeth George Foundation.

From the earliest days of the Foundation, we began augmenting our grant-giving to include students in MFA programs across the country, playwrights who are just entering the field or laboring to establish themselves in it, poets, writers of creative non-fiction, unpublished writers seeking financial assistance for research purposes, as well as young people ageing out of the foster care system, and disadvantaged youth particularly in the area of the arts. 

We’ve seen our grant recipients become published novelists, poets, playwrights, and short story writers; we’ve seen them nominated and chosen for book awards; we’ve taken enormous pleasure in their successes; we’ve asked some of them to join the Board of Trustees to select future grant recipients. From the beginning, it’s been an enormous pleasure to give writers of all levels and genres our vote of confidence in their abilities, talents, voices, and most of all their determination to move forward in an in credibly difficult artistic field.

Writers of all ages have applied. Writers of all ethnicities have applied. LGBTQ writers have applied. The beauty of the Foundation is that all we’re really looking for is a passion for the written word, the talent to put the word on paper, and the discipline to work day after day without having the slightest idea about whether the work will ever rest in the hands of an appreciate audience. It’s the work itself that we seek to encourage through the grants we make. It’s our faith in the applicant that we want to show when we make a grant.