The PEN America U.S. Writers Aid Initiative supports professional writers in the United States facing financial hardship due to a short-term emergency situation. Applicants do not need to be PEN America members and all grantees will receive a free one year membership.
Applications are accepted and reviewed on a quarterly basis. Deadlines for 2025 are currently January 1st, April 1st, July 1st, and October 1st.
Eligibility
This grant is open to professional writers including:
- Fiction authors
- Nonfiction authors
- Poets
- Playwrights
- Screenwriters
- Translators
- Journalists
Writers currently enrolled in degree-granting programs are also not eligible.
Professional Credentials
The grants committee will review applicants’ credentials to determine if they qualify as a ‘professional writer.’ Qualifying work includes:
- One or more books that were not self published or published by a press that charges for publication.
- Multiple essays, short stories, or poems appearing in online or print literary anthologies or literary journals in the last two years.
- A full-length play, performed in a theater by a professional theater company. Academic company productions are only eligible if the author was not a student at the time of production.
- Employment as a full-time professional journalist, columnist, or critic, or a record of consistent freelance publications over the last two years.
- Forthcoming books, essays, short stories, poems, or articles under contract and for which the name of the publisher can be provided.
