Our Mission
WriteOn NYC aims to develop two communities simultaneously. First, we provide passionate writing teachers to New York City middle and high school students. Second, we prepare MFA creative writing candidates for careers in teaching and non-profit work and provide financial support throughout their graduate studies.
One fellowship. Two missions.
Literature helps us to see beyond the quotidian and increases our capacity for empathy. At WriteOn, we want to make literature more accessible to students, both as readers and writers.
Helen Schulman is a novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. She is the author of the novels Come With Me (San Francisco Chronicle ten best books of 2019) This Beautiful Life (a New York Times and International Best Seller), A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, A Public Space and The Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing. She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Schulman has been a NYFA Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Aspen Words Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Fellow (Columbia University) and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Her new novel, Lucky Dogs, will be published in June 2023.
Phineas Lambert is a native New Yorker. He serves as treasurer for Orion Magazine and is former Publisher and Director of Guernica. He teaches in The New School’s creative writing program, where he earned his MFA.
Catherine Bloomer is the Associate Director of WriteOn. She began her career with WriteOn as one half of the first Fellow team. Since then, she has been engaged on every level: she directs, trains, and teaches the WriteOn Fellows in an innovative pedagogy seminar. She coordinates with the partner schools, organizes the final readings, and is responsible for the hiring process. She maintains and adds content to the database and website, and creates promotional and educational materials.
Catherine is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Premodern Disability Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a PhD, M.MPhil, and MA in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a MFA in Fiction from The New School. Her writing focuses on disability, gender, reason, and education in the middle ages.
Grace Shields, based in Brooklyn, is a graduate of the New School’s MFA program where she studied fiction, non-fiction, and graphic narrative writing. A long time fellow at George Jackson Academy, she is excited to continue working with WriteOn.
In 2016, Helen Schulman told Vicky Gottlieb of WriteOn NYC’s extraordinary first class and lamented that we would be unable to continue to help past the single semester. The Gottlieb Family—David, Vicky, Kay, and Ben—decided to fund WriteOn NYC fellowships in Vicky’s honor so that New York City’s future might be brightened by these fantastic young storytellers. Thus, WriteOn NYC was born! The family has continued to fund fellowships every year, and in 2020 generous friends of the family established The Alexandra Goldfluss Fellowship in memory of Vicky’s mother, Alexandra Goldfluss.
George Jackson Academy is the only independent, non-sectarian, need-blind upper elementary and middle school for bright boys from low-income families in NYC. The school was created to engage underserved, academically capable boys from 4th to 8th grade, a time when young men are particularly vulnerable to disengaging from school. George Jackson Academy creates a life-changing experience by challenging its students to grow not only as scholars, but also as friends and brothers in community. No child is denied admission because of an inability to pay.
St Benedict’s Preparatory School was founded in 1868 by the Benedictine monks of Newark Abbey, whose successors run the school to this day. Located in Newark, the school is devoted to serving young men and women of color, particularly from low-income families, while welcoming students from all backgrounds to foster true diversity. St. Benedict’s offers a rigorous curriculum that prepares students for college and beyond, and places an emphasis on the mind, character, and spirit. Alongside the pursuit of academic excellence, the school is committed to building a supportive community.
Founded in 1993 as a collaboration between the New York City Board of Education and Citigroup, the High School of Economics and Finance combines financial career education with a college preparatory program. In addition to their core subjects, all students take business classes and many of them pursue business majors after graduation. The school boasts high Regents exam passing rates and at least 90% of the seniors graduate each June. With a location in lower Manhattan, HSEF draws students from all five boroughs and from a variety of cultural backgrounds.