Mary Tanenbaum Award for Nonfiction

The Mary Tanenbaum Award is a literary award offered annually to promising young California writers. The award is sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and administered by Intersection for the Arts. There is no entry fee to apply for this award.

The award is intended to encourage young writers of an unpublished manuscript that is completed or in-progress. All applicants must, therefore, be between 20 and 35 years of age.

Originally established in memory of Joseph Henry Jackson, the Mary Tanenbaum Award recognizes outstanding nonfictional prose. Applicants must be residents of and currently living in northern California (anywhere in California north of the line dividing Monterery County from San Luis Obispo County) for three consecutive years immediately prior to the contest deadline.

This award is part of the annual Literary Competition administered by Intersection for the Arts' Literary Series. The competition includes two other awards, the James Duval Phelan Award and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. In recent years, several Literary Competition award-winners have secured publishing deals with major publishing houses such as St. Martin’s Press, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Knopf as a result of these awards. Former award recipients include Philip Levine, Ernest J. Gaines, Al Young, Michael Palmer, Frank Chin, Jane Hirschfield, Lyn Hejinian, David St. John, Dagoberto Gilb, and Sallie Tisdale.

External links

• Intersection for the Arts' Website