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Welcome to Our October Newsletter
CONGRATULATIONS to the winners of our 26th annual Tom Howard/John
H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest! Charlie Schneider
submitted the winning story, "Lulu",
and Ryan Ireland submitted the winning essay, "Circumambulatory
Cacozelia". In additional to our ten Honorable
Mentions, we awarded a special Second Prize to Elizabeth
Brina for her essay, "How
They Met". This contest received 1,572 entries from
around the world. Dennis Norris II selected the winners, assisted by
Lauren Singer Ledoux. Read all
the winning entries. See the
press release.
Our new
fiction and essay contest is open now. Duotrope joins us as
a co-sponsor, and we will again award $2,000 to the top two winners.
The deadline is April 30, 2019.
Want to view past newsletters?
See our archives.
Need assistance? Let us help.
For daily contest announcements and resources for writers, join our
109,000 followers on Twitter at @WinningWriters.
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Congratulations to Jessica
Brody, George Harrar, Evelyn
Krieger, John Reinhart, Harry
Bauld (featured poem: "In
the Street Without My Glasses"), R.
Bremner, Lesléa Newman, Audrey
Andujar Wright, Dennis Herrell, David
Kherdian, Helen Leslie Sokolsky, Vivi
Zografou, Robert Walton, Lorna Wood,
and Lance Johnson.
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Join Cogswell College for Litquake,
and get read to like a baby at bedtime! One of the most anticipated
literary nights of the year, San Francisco's Lit
Crawl attracts close to 10,000 people, and is the world's
largest literary pub crawl. Bookstores, cafes, restaurants, shops and
other venues in the Mission District participate—taking over several
city blocks. This year, Cogswell students (21 years of age or older, of
course) will host an edgy, high-profile literary event showcasing
Cogswell's multimedia literary journal, COG.
Grandma told us not to fart in
public. Violent movies were off-limits for years. But sometimes, gross
is gorgeous and gore makes sense. Sometimes it's what really
happened—or a necessary escape from some subtler pain.
On Saturday, October
20, in San Francisco's Mission District, COG and
Litquake host respected literary authors getting gory like a Rob Zombie
flick. The all-star lineup includes Molly Giles, Tomas Moniz, Ron
Austin, July Westhale and Keenan Norris.
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Deadline: October 28
New Letters invites you to submit a short story on the topic of
children to the New Letters
Publication Award in Fiction. The winner receives a cash
prize of $750 and publication in New Letters. Stories must
concern this year's topic of children in some way, whether implicitly
or explicitly through title, setting, plot, theme, conflict, or the
minds of the characters.
All entries are considered for
publication and must be unpublished. Multiple entries are welcome with
appropriate fees. Entries may only be submitted through Submittable.
Postal entries will not be considered. Winners will be announced in
March 2019. For complete guidelines, visit our website.
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Deadline:
October 31 (postmark or online submission date)
Final Judge: Timothy Donnelly
The Sunken Garden Poetry Prize
is a prestigious national poetry prize for adult writers. Established
in 2002, the Prize has drawn submissions from around the country that
have been judged by renowned poets such as Martha Collins, Patricia
Smith, and Tony Hoagland. The winner receives a cash prize, an
introductory reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, and
publication of a chapbook. Hill-Stead began partnering with Tupelo
Press for the publication of the chapbook in 2013.
The Tupelo Press Sunken Garden
Poetry Prize includes a cash award of $1,000, publication by Tupelo
Press, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic
publicity and promotion. Results announced in winter 2019.
Submit a previously
unpublished, chapbook-length poetry manuscript with a table of contents
and an acknowledgements page (if applicable). There is no mandatory
page count, but we suggest in the area of 20 to 36 pages. All
manuscripts will be read and considered with full respect, regardless
of length, and no manuscript will be rejected simply because it's
shorter or longer. We encourage online submission via our Submittable
system. You may also submit via postal mail:
Tupelo Press
Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize
P.O. Box 1767
North Adams, MA 01247
For mailed manuscripts, request
notification of receipt by including a SASP. For notification of the
winner, enclose a SASE. Manuscripts will not be returned.
A reading fee of $25 payable by
check to Tupelo Press or via Submittable must accompany each
submission. Multiple submissions are accepted, each accompanied by a
$25 reading fee.
Please enjoy this selection by
Chaun Ballard, author of Flight (Tupelo Press, 2018),
winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize:
Midway
So now when the ghost asks me
my age, I say, I'm stomach over
the
waistband; I'm button up
and
neck-tied; I'm shoes no longer
the
last squawking on hard wooden
floors;
I'm totem pole carved with faces
of
the past; I'm apple for lunch, walnuts,
and
pleasant dinners; I'm red cross
bloodletting
and good credit; I'm
my
father in that faded polaroid
taken
somewhere in California;
I'm
high school reunion almost
checked
the box: maybe; I'm electric
slide
and Jesus music, hallelujahs
and
morning glory; I'm open
book
and lamp light; I'm Achilles
if
he lived during the Renaissance;
I'm
nearly in danger of not being
a
danger; old enough to say,
you
were good and died young.
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Deadline: November 1
Only
on Defenestrationism.net
Combine three or more Flash
works into something greater. Recurring characters, extended motifs,
harmonious subject matters—all are such correlations, but we encourage
innovation and new ideas. Go crazy with it, kids, flash your faces off.
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Winner: $75
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Runner-up: $60
Please enjoy this excerpt from
our most recent Grand Prize Winner:
The Minotaur
by Salvatore Difalco
THE BUS
I could smell exhaust fumes. I
wasn't fully awake. My estranged wife Carolina had knitted the burgundy
mohair sweater I was wearing, before she started hating me, but I had
no memory of putting it on. I rubbed my face. A glimpse of my hands
made me start. My fingers looked swollen and inflamed, fingernails
discoloured. I performed violent jazz hands, hoping to restore
circulation. But this was painful.
People on the bus looked like
animals bearing reproachful burdens. A commensurate odour prevailed.
Life in the city can be hard. Yet I felt little empathy for them, my
fellow beasts. We had failed. We had all failed. What was left for us
to do but despair, moving from foot to foot, or hoof to hoof, like
doomed livestock?
The bus driver leaned to his
open side window and blew snot from his nose in a silvery mucous-jet.
He turned and caught my eye. Blue-tinged steel-wool sideburns coiled
from under his ill-fitting navy driver's cap. The black holes of his
nostrils yawned, small black eyes peeping out above them, like their satellites.
A man beside me, who bore a
resemblance to a fine English horse, lifted and lowered his chin,
fluttering his lips. I held the stanchion, white-knuckled; an
unpleasant disequilibrium threatened to topple me whenever the bus
swerved or jerked to a sudden stop.
"You don't look
well," said a woman wearing red plastic, gripping the same
stanchion, in a falsetto rivaling that of Johnny, Señor Wences's
talking hand. Her arm seemed unattached to her small, round body. I
tried not to think about it too much.
"I slept poorly," I
said.
A whiff of salami breath made
me turn my head and face the window. Clouds darkened the world without.
Perhaps a great storm was moving in, a monsoon, to cleanse the city.
"I know who you are,"
said the woman in my ear.
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Application Deadline: November
12
Join Us!
15th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Delray Beach, Florida,
January 21-26, Extraordinary Poetry Workshops
Focus on your work and be
inspired by America's most engaging and award-winning poets. Workshops
with: Ellen Bass, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Stuart Dischell, Aracelis
Girmay, Campbell McGrath, Gregory Pardlo, Matthew Olzmann, Eleanor
Wilner.
Six days and evenings of
workshops, readings, craft talks, panel discussions, one-on-one
conferences, social events, and so much more in Delray Beach.
Additional faculty: Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown and
Stephen Gibson. Special Guest: Sharon Olds. Poet-At-Large: Tyehimba
Jess.
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Deadline: November 19
Creative Nonfiction, in partnership with the Center for Games & Impact
at Arizona State University, is looking for new work about the role of
games and play in our everyday lives. For this special issue, we're
seeking true stories that explore the ways our society integrates
games, and especially games whose impact transcends entertainment and
changes us in ways outside of the gaming context.
We're looking for stories that
illuminate the great variety of ways in which games have affected the
lives of diverse individuals and communities—offering opportunities to
fail forward within a safe context, play with possible selves and
futures, collaborate with people from different backgrounds, develop
professional or other skills, become protagonists in simulated worlds,
or collaborate with others on solutions to real-world problems.
Above all, we are looking for
vivid narratives—illuminative stories, rich with scene, character,
detail, and a distinctive voice—that offer unique insights into the
subject. We want evocative narratives that allow readers to step into
ideas, and stories should be grounded in factual occurrences and true
events. All essays submitted will be considered for publication; this
is a paying market.
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Deadline: November 30
Two Sylvias
Press is looking to publish Full-Length Poetry Manuscripts by Women
Over 50 (established or emerging poets)
Prize: $1,000 and print book and eBook publication
by Two Sylvias Press, 20 copies of the winning book, and a vintage art
nouveau pendant
The
Wilder Series Book Prize is open to women over 50 years of
age. Women submitting manuscripts may be poets with one or more
previously published chapbooks/books or poets without any prior
chapbook/book publications. (We use an inclusive definition of
"woman" and "female" and we welcome trans women,
genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are significantly
female-identified.) All manuscripts will be considered for publication.
See the
complete contest guidelines.
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Deadline: December 1
Judge — Kim Addonizio
is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story
collections, and two books on writing poetry. She is an NEA and
Guggenheim Foundation fellow, has won two Pushcart Prizes, and was a
National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me.
Prizes — $1,500
& publication (winner);
$500 & publication (honorable mention); all finalists will be
published in the 2019 Spring/Summer awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems.
$20 entry fee includes copy of the awards issue.
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Kansas Poets with book-length
works published in the past three years (2016/17/18) are eligible to
win the $1,000 2019 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry. The
annual award, rotating between poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, is
sponsored by the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at
Washburn University in Topeka. There is no fee to enter.
This year's judge will be
Steven Hind, longtime English professor at Hutchinson Community
College, one-time editor of Young Kansas Writers, and one of the deans
of Kansas Poetry, as evidenced in his collections: Familiar
Ground (1980), That Trick of Silence (1990), In a
Place With No Map (1997) and The Loose Change of Wonder
(2006).
Deadline for
submission is December 31, 2018. For complete guidelines, please visit
our website.
The 2018 Hefner Heitz Kansas
Book Award in Literary Nonfiction went to Louise Krug for her memoir Tilted:
the Post-Brain Surgery Journals. Other previous winners are
Andrew Milward in Fiction, for his story collection I Was a
Revolutionary, and Amy Fleury, for her poetry collection Sympathetic
Magic.
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 Submission deadline: January 15, 2019. $1,000 and
book publication for each winner.
The annual John Ciardi Prize
for Poetry and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction are
awarded to collections of poetry and short fiction in English by a
living author. Guidelines
available here.
Prize-winning books have
received reviews or features in: Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus
Reviews, ForeWord Reviews, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Kansas
City Star, Slate, etc., and won or placed in the Poets' Prize, Eric
Hoffer, IPPY, ForeWord, Chautauqua, Balcones Fiction, Devil's Kitchen,
etc.
Founded in 1971 and part of the
University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1983, BkMk Press publishes
collections of poetry, short fiction, and creative essays. Publishing
roughly six titles a year, the press has over 140 titles in print.
BkMk
Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 5101 Rockhill
Road, Kansas City, MO 64110.
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Deadline: February 25, 2019
Creative Nonfiction magazine is seeking new work for an upcoming issue
dedicated to memoir.
We're looking stories that are
honest, accurate, informative, intimate, and—most importantly—true.
Whether your story is revelatory or painful, hilarious or tragic, if
it's about you and your life, we want to read it.
Submissions must be vivid and
dramatic; they should combine a strong and compelling narrative with an
informative or reflective element, and reach beyond a strictly personal
experience for some universal or deeper meaning. We're looking for
well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice; all
essays must tell true stories and be factually accurate.
Creative Nonfiction editors will award $2,500 for Best Essay
and two $500 prizes for runner-up. All essays will
be considered for publication in a special "Memoir" issue of
the magazine to be published in 2020. Essays must be previously
unpublished and no longer than 4,000 words.
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 Finishing up your manuscript? Putting those last
touches on your thesis or dissertation? Submitting application essays
to your dream school? Can't figure out where to put the dialogue in
your magnum opus? These writing projects can take a lot out of a
person. Sometimes the work is so dense and the topics so subjective
that it's difficult to see a clear end in sight. Sometimes the solution
is as simple as lending another pair of eyes to those stuck points.
Don't pull out more hair—give
yourself a break! I'll help ease your typing tension so you can show
that writer's block who's boss. Email Lauren Singer Ledoux
at SingerLaur@gmail.com
or call 347-675-4877 for professional copyediting, proofreading, and
general assistance with your current project. I have many years of
experience, a bundle of great references, and am currently a staff
judge at Winning Writers. Let's tackle those big ideas
together!
"When I needed help with
my chapbook manuscript, Lauren was candid, professional, and
insightful. She was a pleasure to work with and I will definitely be
hiring her for editing in the future."
-Catherine Weiss
"If you need fresh eyes
and solid creative insight, Lauren is absolutely the person to
call."
-Stephanie Huey
"Lauren regularly edited for me. Her comments
and corrects were thoughtful, thorough, and holistic. She also
frequently went above and beyond and offered style suggestions and
additional ways to structure my approach."
-Roxanne Astra Slate
"Lauren takes the time while
editing, to both consider the one-day reader and the voice of the
author."
-Tara Jean Bernier
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Jendi Reiter's debut story
collection, An Incomplete
List of My Wishes, was runner-up for the 2017 Sunshot
Prose Prize and is now available from Sunshot Press/New
Millennium Writings. The stories in An Incomplete List of My Wishes
have won prizes from such journals as The Iowa Review, New Letters,
Bayou Magazine, Solstice Lit Mag, and American Fiction. These tales
explore the fraught relationships among queer and straight family
members, the search for a post-traumatic spirituality, and the fine
line between soulmates and intimate enemies.
"This short story
collection is the product of a wonderful mixing of novelist and poet.
For each of Jendi Reiter's stories, the tension is expertly built but
never released. By exposing the fraught nature of different
relationships, the reader must sit in their own discomfort, wondering
about the things never said."
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Some contests are best suited
to writers at the early stages of their careers. Others are better for
writers with numerous prizes and publications to their credit. Here is
this month's selection of Spotlight Contests for your consideration:
Emerging Writers
PEN/Robert
J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
PEN America will award 12 prizes of $2,000 and anthology publication
for the first published short story, 12,000 words maximum, by a US
citizen or permanent resident. Entries must be submitted by publisher.
Due November 10.
Intermediate Writers
Eric
Gregory Awards. Awards 20,000 pounds in
prizes for a collection of up to 30 poems, drama-poems, or
belles-lettres, by a writer who will be under age 30 as of March 31 of
the year following the deadline. The author must be a British national
or a resident in Great Britain and Northern Ireland for at least three
years. Previously published work accepted. Due October 31.
Advanced Writers
Griffin
Poetry Prize. Two top prizes of C$65,000 for
poetry books published in the current calendar year. One prize will go
to a living Canadian poet or translator, the other to a living poet or
translator from any country (including Canada). Publisher should send 4
copies of book plus entry form and a press packet. Due December 31.
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Can you just imagine not being
able to read your child a bedtime story? Or being able to read a menu
in a restaurant? Or fill out a job application? There are more than 36
million adults in America that struggle with basic reading, writing,
and math skills.
Take a look at the stories of
some adult learners. Real people. Real stories. Stories of heartbreak,
embarrassment, even desperation. In equal measure, you will hear tales
of accomplishment, triumph, and inspiration.
"Getting
My Diploma Was Once an Unthinkable Victory"
In elementary school Mayra Sanchez was put in special ed because of a
language barrier—she was born in Puerto Rico. The label followed her
all the way through high school. She graduated with an IEP Diploma. But
the employers she was trying to work with in the health care field told
her that it was not acceptable. Her goal was to become a phlebotomist.
She had been told in high school that she would never achieve a diploma
because of her learning disability.
But Mayra was determined. She
joined the Syracuse City School District's Adult Education program and
took classes for three years while working full time. When she finally
passed the TASC Test and earned her High School Equivalency Diploma,
she was very emotional. She broke down while telling her story at
graduation and Kathy Lent, coordinator of adult education for the
district, finished reading her speech for her. Today she is working
full time as a phlebotomist and is taking her pre-reqs at the college
level to join an X-Ray Tech program.
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tweet or less.
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Julian Peters writes, "The
poem is perhaps my absolute favourite of Rimbaud’s. I won’t even bother
trying to translate it, though; its beauty is all in its musicality,
the way it seems to spiral gracefully into the ether like the smoke
from one of Rimbaud’s clay pipes."
Chanson de la
plus haute tour
Oisive jeunesse
À tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! que le temps vienne
Où les cœurs s’éprennent.
Je me suis dit : laisse,
Et qu’on ne te voie :
Et sans la promesse
De plus hautes joies.
Que rien ne t’arrête
Auguste retraite.
J’ai tant fait patience
Qu’à jamais j’oublie;
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.
Ainsi la Prairie
À l’oubli livrée,
Grandie, et fleurie
D’encens et d’ivraies,
Au bourdon farouche
De cent sales mouches.
Ah! Mille veuvages
De la si pauvre âme
Qui n’a que l’image
De la Notre-Dame!
Est-ce que l’on prie
La Vierge Marie ?
Oisive jeunesse
À tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah! que le temps vienne
Où les cœurs s’éprennent.
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Mx.
Personality
My forced exposure to psychological tests a decade ago convinced me
that "personality" is a contestable concept. (A belief which,
needless to say, did not improve my score.) The self is situational,
changing over time, and wearing different personae depending on the
norms and trust level in a given social setting. Attempting to quantify
it as a fixed trait, like eye color, can erase the impact of
interpersonal stressors and make the subject feel powerless to change.
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