The Leyla Beban Young Authors Foundation was founded to support middle and high school students in pursuit of their passion for creative writing. We were inspired to do this in memory of Leyla Beban, who loved to read and write stories, to get lost in the adventure of imagination, and had hoped to publish at least one book in her life. She was fortunate to have mentors in middle school that encouraged her to follow her passion and help her develop, and we wanted to provide support and encouragement in her name to others with similar talents and dreams.

So our mission, simply put, is to provide the encouragement, resources, training, and inspiration to young writers like Leyla.

How do we do that?
We focus on four main activities in support of this mission. The biggest are the ‘$1000 for 1000 Words’ fiction-writing competition and the journal, Bluefire, which publishes the work from the competition. All submissions are eligible and the pieces judged as showing the most promise are awarded scholarships and prizes, and guaranteed a spot in the journal. Other ‘honorable mentions’ are also published in the journal. The Grand Prizes are $1000, one for the best submissions in each of middle school and high school grades. We give $100 cash to the best submission in each grade, and $50 to each honorable mention entry. Our goal is to encourage students and to provide an avenue for them to feel accomplished, to see their name in print, and get a taste of what it feels like to be a published author. We engage school age students in the design, layout, and publishing of the journal, furthering our mission by providing experience in self-publishing and publishing tools.

We want to expose the students to writers, publishers, and literary agents through a series of public lectures. Our goal is to further inspire students by introducing them to people who have committed their life and livelihood to writing and publishing.