Leo Litwak is the third recipient of the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Award of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. This annual unsolicited award honors extraordinary published Bay Area Jewish writers and comes with a cash award.

The Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Fund was established to recognize and award writers on an annual basis who have made an exceptional impact in the Bay Area through their uniquely Jewish perspective. Awardees must be published Jewish writers who reside in the Bay Area, are considered exceptionally gifted by their peers and readers, write with a high degree of creativity and intelligence, include positive Jewish themes in their subject matter and refer to Israel in a supportive and constructive manner.

The annual nomination and selection process for the award is determined by a committee of professionals, academics and published writers, which also chooses a magazine, literary supplement and journal or both for publication and promotion of the recipient’s writing. There are no stipulations as to how the $5,000 grant may be used.

Leo Litwak, professor of English literature at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years, is the author of the novels Waiting for the News, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1970, and To the Hanging Gardens. His short story "The Eleventh Edition" was awarded first prize in the 1990 edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Phillip Levine called his memoir, The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII, "the finest memoir of WWII combat I have read by an American." Litwak's most recent collection, Nobody's Baby and Other Stories, was published in 2005.

Litwak received his award in March at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library, in conversation with Library Director Jonathan Schwartz.

For more information call Judy Bloom at 415.512.6263 or email judyb@sfjcf.org.