ILF Announces Winners of the 2024-2025 Encouragement Fund!

Each year, the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund selects three wonderful children's book creators in need of encouragement and gives them each a $2,000 grant, no strings attached, supported by the incomparable and generous literary agent Stephen Fraser.

This year, we focused our grants on creators working on middle grade fiction who have at least one previously published book, and could not be more delighted to announce the results.

So, without further ado...Congratulations to Linda Jackson Williams, Darlene Campos, and Ryan Tahmaseb!

Congratulations to these three incredible children's book creators! The Encouragement Fund will reopen for submissions in the fall of 2025.

The Encouragement Fund was started in partnership between the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund and renowned children's book editor and agent, Stephen Fraser. Below, Stephen shares some wisdom on the art and craft of writing picture books that capture the attention of agents and editors.

From a Literary Agent

by Stephen Fraser, for the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund

One of the things I find myself telling aspiring writers is not to forget the reader. Writers often get inside their heads—understandably, since they often live with a story idea for months, even years—but it’s important to remember you are writing for an audience. It doesn’t cheapen your art to write for an audience; it elevates it, because you are learning to make your story universal. In other words, re-membering your reader doesn’t mean pandering to an audience with cheap tricks—though some people do this—like teasing them with misleading plot points made purely to capture attention or rising to elevated emotions that aren’t authentic.

Make the reader ‘see’ your story with your descriptions and with information that is unfolded through your narrative that makes the reader actually care about your characters the way that you do. Give your reader the information needed to understand your story. For instance, in an historical novel, don’t assume young readers know all the facts that you have learned in your research. Sometimes it is good to state the obvious (i.e. when was World War I, where exactly is Alexandria, who was the king (or queen) at the time). The ‘sound’ of language is very important, particularly in a picture book which is essentially a performance piece. But every piece of good writing should have a read-aloud quality that begs to be shared.

Another thing to consider: what is the right format for your story. It could be a verse-novel, a young adult with several points of view, or a middle-grade story with an omniscient narrator. Something I have noticed in adult novels is that the writer doesn’t always give breathing space to the reader (i.e. a novel with no chapters). You don’t want to alienate your reader; you want to embrace them with your storytelling and lead them from page to page to the very end. This can determine length and numbers of chapters, whether there is a Part One and Part Two, and so on. The best writing has the affectionate quality of a storyteller including the audience in the delight of the story. Think of Rudyard Kipling calling his reader ‘Best Beloved.’ Remember feeling safe hearing the stories of A. A. Milne or Beatrix Potter. I feel that way when I read children’s novels by writers such as Jonathan Auxier or Kate DeCamillo. If you respect your reader, you’ll tell a good story in the best way. 

About Stephen

Stephen Fraser has been a literary agent with The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency for 20 years, after working for more than twenty-five years at seven major publishers including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Scholastic. His clients have won the Newbery Honor, both the Edgar and PEN awards, and received multiple starred reviews. 

He is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont with a degree in English Literature and Master’s Degree in Children’s Literature from Simmons College in Boston. Stephen is a popular speaker at writer’s conferences throughout the country. 

He has recently established the Stephen Fraser Encouragement Fund through SCBWI’s Impact and Legacy division, which offers three grants annually of $2,000 to writers, illustrators, and translators with at least one children’s book published.