Incendiary Lit

That’s right, get your three poems together, your $15 check, and mail that paper to Boulevard. Here’s the link to the information, and here’s the info:

Open to anyone who hasn’t published a book of poetry (standard, chapbooks ok, as long as nothing’s been ‘with a national distributor’)

Price: $15 (includes a one year subscription)
# of poems: 3
Deadline: Today (5/15/08)

The Writers @ Work (where hip meets lit according to their website) is a conference held in Utah June 23rd-27th. Yes, just days after my birthday and I didn’t win free tuition from a pool of hundreds. So sad. Anyway, here are the winners. Go here to check out more information about the conference. It looks really cool.

(from their website www.writersatwork.org)

Winner: Margot Wizansky, Brookline, MA, for “Cosmography”

About “Cosmography,” Ms. Addonizio had the following comments:

“The author of ‘Cosmography’ has a gift for narrative and for language which creates an experience of lived life for the reader. I admired this writer’s ability to convincingly render the voice of an eighteenth-century midwife in the ambitious opening poem. Like the description of a steak in ‘Breakfast at the Retirement Home,’ the writing here is often ‘luscious, blood-rare.’ ”

1st Honorable Mention: Keegan Goodman, Chicago, IL, for “Four Poems (’Residence’ and others)”

About “Four Poems: (”Residence” and others):

“From an autobiography written by a dead man to a woman attempting to construct human beings out of grease fat and coffee grounds, these prose poems create their own marvelous and off-kilter worlds.”

—

I don’t know about you guys, but that first honorable mention sounds awfully interesting. Russell Edson-esque is what I’m hoping for, but we’ll see. These winners will be published in an upcoming Quarterly West, and will receive free tuition to the Writers at Work conference. The poetry winners were chosen by Kim Addonizio, fiction by Steve Almond, nonfiction by Abigail Thomas. The other winners were (fiction)

Winner: Ben Roberts, Ogden, UT, for “The Three Nephites”

About “The Three Nephites,” Mr. Almond had this to say:

“My God. I was absolutely blown away by this story, which does what every great short story must: it creates its own world and sucks the reader into that world and horrifies us and at the same time (and this is the miracle, I think) makes us never want to leave. The voice is absolutely fearless, ecstatic, and dangerously wise. I could feel my heart thumping as I read the last line, and for a long time after.”

(not exactly a scathing review) and nonfiction:

Winner: Valerie Due, San Diego, CA (Yay San Diego), for “The Skinning Board”

About “The Skinning Board,” Ms. Thomas has the following comments:

“I love the emotional restraint coupled with the ravishing prose of the piece. It serves so perfectly the young narrator whose initiation into the harsh realities of life–and death–on a farm is being presented here.”

Crab Orchard Review’s Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction prizes.

University of Pittsburgh Press Agnes Lynch Starrett First book prize. 

Yep, the Contemporary Verse 2 2-day poem contest is here, and it’s half over. The ten words are Vessel, filament, proof, article, thorax, wrench, buckle, sienna, rattle, and nervous. The real wrench in the gears is thorax. Filament is a cool word, and easy to use because it sounds so cool. They have a clock on the guidelines site here.
So far, I’ve written 3 different versions. A sestina, a double abecedarian, and a white space happy free verse poem. All with different narratives (the 2xABCDian is loosely a narrative).

I planned on writing a more standard for me “kind of quirky and ironic free verse” poem, and maybe try something even more crazy, like a paradelle. That would be pretty sweet, but I make no promises.

After the contest is closed, I hope to post some participant’s alternate poems as well as my own in a little permanent link page by the Firestarter Challenges. You know the address: zebulonhuset (a - t) gmail (dot) com.

It’s Tupelo Press and Crazyhorse magazine together to offer this first book award, which means, as it says, no full length books published. I believe chapbooks are ok.

Important information:
Deadline: April 15th
Length: 48-80 pages
Cost: $25
Prize: $3000
Bonus: Every entrant receives a copy of the winning book. No, let’s call it “wins” Every entrant WINS a copy of the winning book.

Here’s a link to the rest of the info, you can pay for the contest through paypal, which is nice for someone who’s running out of checks, like me. And you have to fill out a permission form and submit it as well, the link to that is here as a pdf, or also on the page.

Yes. To be redundant, CV2, Contemporary Verse 2 is running a 2-day poetry contest. You get a list of ten words, and have 2 days from the receipt of the words to write a 48 line or less poem. Here’s where you enter. Pay through paypal. Enter today though! How fun is that? I’ll post alternate versions of contest poems that people submit, because I don’t know about you, but I’m not just writing one poem and sticking with it, I’ll probably toss around upwards of 3 or 4 different versions.

Here’s what it’s about. Basically, and simply, it’s an mtv sponsored new division of the National Poetry Series, which picks only from college (undergrad and grad) students. This, the inaugural year is judged by none other than Yusef Komunyakaa, who the winner will interview for MTVu in an episode of “My shot with” as well as having the book published by HarperCollins, and, yeah, I wouldn’t mind my first book being published by Harper-FREAKING-COLLINS. Not a bad place for a first book, if you ask me. So obviously, I’ve entered, and await my inevitable rejection, like so many others must be. I really just want to get this first book out of the way already, I’m pretty sure I’ve got it where I want it, the right poems in the right order, so I am trying to move onto the next collection, which is hard to do without a first published. Sooner or later. Hmph.

In other first book contest news, The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize looms on the horizon, however, end of April deadline, and that is another really sweet contest, very prestigious, and there’s a $5,000 grand prize, which sets it a little further apart.

What) The Crab Orchard Review’s Annual Literary Contests: The Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, The Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, & The John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize.

When) April 30th, 2008.

How much) $10 entry fee (includes an issue) with grand prizes of $1,500 in each of the three contests.

Why) Because Crab Orchard Review’s a rad journal, very nice, and always quality. At an entry fee of only ten bucks, which includes a copy of the issue the winners are published in. You can merely look at it as buying a copy of the journal if money’s tight, as it is for most young writers. A copy of Crab Orchard’s worth ten bucks. And you never know, your entry may just be worth $1,500.

OK, I’ve been wanting to set up something like this for a long time. Contemporary Verse 2, or CV2 is running a two day contest. You pre-register by March 28th. OnApril 5th all entrants are given a list of ten words, and have 48 hours to write a poem using those  ten words. How awesome is that? Tell your friends! It’s a great thing. No more than 48 lines, also, so for those of us who typically write shorter poems, ahem, we don’t have to worry about losing due to sheer volume (or lack thereof).

It’s a $10 fee, first prize is $350, Second $175, Third gets $90 (but not publication).

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.