Win Dinner with Your Favorite Author, Book Club Visits and More Prizes in New Charitable Auction

Authors for Voices of Color's fourth annual auction starts Sept. 26, with proceeds going to the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books

Major authors are assembling to auction one-of-a-kind experiences and items for a good cause.

On Tuesday, Authors for Voices of Color announced the lineup for its fourth annual auction, which donates all proceeds to the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books and its efforts to diversify the publishing industry through internship grants and more.

Bidding for the online silent auction starts Tuesday, Sept. 26, at 12 p.m. ET and ends Tuesday, Oct. 3, at 9 p.m. ET.

More than 100 exclusive items and offerings are up for grabs this year, including a care package inspired by Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (now a series on Hulu); Zoom book club visits from Elizabeth Gilbert and Curtis Sittenfeld; dinner with Jacqueline Woodson in her New York home; and a one-on-one chat about the writing business with Lessons in Chemistry author Bonnie Garmus

Fans of the YOU series can win signed copies of all four books by Caroline Kepnes plus a special note from her character Joe Goldberg (played by Penn Badgley on the Netflix show).

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There's also a hand-annotated copy of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me; a book sculpture from artist Luciana Frigerio made out of the Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow hardcover personalized by author Gabrielle Zevin; and a handwritten letter from Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere) about her latest book.

Find the complete list here.

The Authors for Voices of Color initiative was started in 2020 by writers Andrea Bartz (The Spare Room, We Were Never Here) and Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (Seinfeldia).

Last year's auction raised $43,250 for We Need Diverse Book’s internship grants and professional program for interns and midlevel employees of color at major publishing houses. In 2020, they raised $14,497, and $23,166 in 2021.

Armstrong says they started the initiative in 2020 "when racial justice was on everyone’s minds," and they are "determined to put in the work for the long haul and not just jump on a bandwagon."

"While the issue of diversity in publishing has fallen off many people's radars, the industry has a long way to go: Publishing is still overwhelmingly White, and book bans — which disproportionately affect BIPOC authors — are at an all-time high," says Armstrong. "It’s crucial to fund efforts to fight for both diversity inside publishing and diverse books being offered in libraries and schools, and this provides a fun way for book people to do just that."

Bartz adds that they are "grateful to the authors, literary agents and other publishing professionals who’ve signed on to donate their time, books and energy this year."

"We can hardly believe how stellar the 2023 roster is. When we put together our first auction in 2020, we wouldn’t have guessed we’d later loop in so many bestselling, household-name authors," she says. "The auction offers a simple way to support diversity in publishing while getting incredible bookish items you won’t find anywhere else."

Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, says, "We are so grateful to Authors for Voices of Color for championing We Need Diverse Books and the communities that we serve, including diverse creators, publishing professionals, and students across the country."

"The proceeds from this auction will help us to make bookshelves more equitable and to fight book bans that have been spreading at an alarming rate," says Richmond.

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