Incendiary Lit

Check it out: The Southeast Review presents the World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. Up to 500 words. Deadline March 15, 2008. Judged by Robert Olen Butler. Submit up to 3 short-shorts. $15 entry. They also offer a poetry contest, same prize and entry fee, submit up to 3 poems. Judged by one of my all-time favorite poets, the king of the sprawling compound sentence, David Kirby.

More immediately, LSU’s journal New Delta is running the Matt Clark Prize with a deadline of February 28, either fiction or poetry. Prize is $100. Entry is $5.

Have at ‘em.

Oh, and wish me luck in the mtvU section of the NPS. My manuscript The Very Bottom of the Sky is under consideration for that now. How freaking cool would that be? The winner even gets to meet Yusef Komunyakaa.

Hey you short fiction writers, or poets who like to dabble into prose, the next two days Firestarter Exercises are part of a special contest. Only Today (Tuesday) and tomorrow’s prose exercises are included, the stories (2,000 words long) must be emailed to zebulonhuset (at) gmail (dot) com by Sunday at midnight. Cash Prize: $30

And no entry fee. Just write the story, email it, and the best story will collect the cash. Have at it.

Cleveland State University’s First Book (and Open) Contest deadline is Just two weeks away! They’ve published their share of wonderful writers, including David Kirby and Thomas Lux, so your work is in good hands. Entry is $25, postmark deadline 2/15/08, here’s the full submission information. Go get ‘em!

Here is all the information you need to submit to the Yale Series of Younger Poets (deadline is next thursday, 11/15/07), one of the biggest awards a young poet can dream of winning. Join the ranks of Louise Gluck, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, John Ashberry, Jack Gilbert, James Tate and Robert Hass, and send in your first manuscript next week… or wait another year.

The Poetry Society of America offers many scholarships, one is the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award, which is a $250 prize for the best poem by a 9-12 grader. Have any younger siblings who like English class? Potential writers, or better yet, budding writers are still high schoolers. And high schoolers like money and being rewarded for being cool. This contest would give them both. And you, being an experienced workshopper, perhaps, can give a malleable minds a push in the right direction, getting them off of the virulent strain of hard end rhyme abstraction-ridden poetry that so many high school students have been infected with. A chance to mentor a sibling or cousin perhaps, then if they turn out to be a badass writer you’ll always be able to look back and feel like you’ve contributed to the arts, right?

To set up a scholarship in perpetuity, as in, one time fee for virtually eternity of every year payouts. The Academy of American Poets works with colleges to set up writing scholarships at schools. A one time payment of just $2,500 gets a $100 scholarship/prize every year. That could fund a small college journal’s contest perhaps. With $25,000 (about) you can get $1,000. Did anyone say book contest? By arranging contests and scholarships at your school press it could do a few things. You can set up a class dedicated to the selection and production of the prize winning book, like Fresno State’s “Philip Levine Prize.” You can raise the quality of submissions to your journal, because, lets face it, we break out the bigger guns for cash. As a writer it’s great to actually get paid for your efforts in cashy money. This means a general increase in the quality of work submitted, as most contests say all work submitted will be considered for publication… See, like Admiral Akbar so cleverly observed “It’s a trap!” But it will result in more exposure to your magazine, and better quality work, making it even more of something that people are excited to be published in. Even if your magazine’s already really good, it will also bring you the satisfaction of doing your part to help young writers getting the attention they deserve. Here’s a link to more official looking information about setting up a scholarship/prize in perpetuity on The Academy of American Poets website. One that doesn’t have pictures of star wars characters on it, I guess.

The James Hearst Poetry Prize and Honickman First Book Prize both require a postmark by tomorrow, then Bakeless Literary Prizes and Briar Cliff Review’s Prizes are the very next day. That’s right. Thursday, November 1, hung-over day after Halloween, be it from the sugar in 500 fun sized Milky Ways, or that last shot of tequila. Here’s more info on them from the post just down the page.