PEN/Jerard Fund Award

The PEN/Jerard Fund Award was given biennially to a woman writer at an early point in her career. (In 2001, 2003, and 2005, the stipend was $5,500.) The award honored a work in progress of general nonfiction distinguished by high literary quality. Because PEN believes that the art of essay writing is not adequately prized in America and that women writers of nonfiction are as deserving of as much critical attention as those of fiction and poetry, the PEN/Jerard Fund Award sought out a work of distinction which might otherwise go under-recognized. This was the first award of its kind established for American women writers of nonfiction.

The PEN/Jerard Fund Award was an outgrowth of the Elise Jerard Environmental Trust (administered by the New York Community Trust), which became effective in 1979 in order “to foster the talents and human purposes to which [Elise Jerard] had devoted her time and energy for many years.” The late Ms. Jerard, a New Yorker who worked passionately on behalf of various environmental and women’s issues, set aside this trust to provide “assistance to a talented woman writer,” a desire that expressed her own ambitions as an amateur writer who was not published during her lifetime.