Cast Your Vote for Dzanc Books

Dear Friends,

Chase Bank has set up a Chase Community Giving program in which they are giving away grant funds to 501(c)3 nonprofits and they are deciding which organizations to donate this money to based on a public vote.

Dzanc Books, the parent company of Black Lawrence Press, is one of the nonprofits eligible to receive such a donation and is asking for your help in pushing our vote total to the top of the list!  The voting is being done through Facebook, just click here, and all you need to do is log in and search for Dzanc Books and vote for us to help us out.  If you have a Twitter account, you can pass along the news to all of your subscribers with a simple click of the mouse.  Likewise, we would appreciate your contacting all your Facebook friends and asking them to vote for Dzanc.

By voting for Dzanc Books, you will be supporting the charitable activities that we perform – the sponsoring of the Dzanc Prize which provides monetary help for an author to set up a literary community service.  To date this prize has supported authors running mentoring sessions for prisoners, as well as cancer patients, and their family members and caregivers.

A vote for Dzanc Books will also support our DWIRPs (Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs) in which we send a professional writer into public schools once per week for the entire school year, from October through June, to utilize creative methods to engage a classroom of students and get them interested in the written word.  At the end of the school year we also put together an anthology of the student work, publishing enough copies for the students, their families, the school library and more, as well as set up public readings for the students.  Each DWIRP costs Dzanc upwards of $7,000 to run and additional funds will allow us to expand this program at a faster rate.  Hundreds of students in underprivileged areas in multiple states have been favorably affected so far by the DWIRPs we have run to date and Dzanc has a list of additional schools waiting for programs to be set up.

Winning a donation from Chase will allow us to further expand these programs and have an effect on more and more individuals nationally.

Again, the process is a simple one, click here and enter Dzanc Books as the charity you are searching for.  We are very appreciative for the support you’ve shown Dzanc Books in the past and thank you in advance for helping us with this task as well.

Sincerely,

Diane Goettel

Executive Editor, Black Lawrence Press