Santiago Mejia / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris

Joe Di Prisco is the Founder of New Literary Project, the nonprofit launched in 2015, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, along with altruistic, visionary educators and artists.

NewLit fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, and students in diverse communities in California and the nation. We take as our watchword the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.” New Literary Project knows the literary arts are a public good.

That’s why and how NewLit supports writers, teachers, and young people in overlooked communities that we highlight and celebrate. 

Through arts education, teacher fellowships, free writing workshops, a major national literary prize, and an annual anthology curated from all our communities’ offerings, we play a part in lifting the world up and building on the promise of a literate, democratic society.

We award annually the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, $50,000, to an emerged and still emerging mid-career author of fiction. For 2024 Ben Fountain is the eighth JCO Prize Winner, succeeding Manuel Muñoz, Lauren Groff, Danielle Evans, Daniel Mason, Laila Lalami, Anthony Marra, and T. Geronimo Johnson.

We lead writing workshops, offered free of charge to fledgling teenage writers at places like Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc Alameda County and elsewhere including public high schools. Workshops are taught by graduate student creative writing teachers from the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, and the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program. Over time we have led thirty workshops in overlooked communities, teaching over four hundred young people, most of whom aspired to be first-generation college students.

We also offer Jack Hazard Fellowships, $5,000 summer awards to creative writers who teach high school. Thirty-two fellowships have been awarded since 2022.

We curate yearly Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project, an anthology edited by Joe Di Prisco, internationally distributed, published by Rare Bird Books. Alongside teenage writers from the workshops, published for the first time, appear all JCO Prize Winners, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Hazard Fellows, and a hundred other distinguished authors who are affiliated with NewLit. Vol. 6 will be released in Fall 2024.

Diane Del Signore is Executive Director of the New Literary Project. Please visit the website: https://www.newliteraryproject.org/