G&A: The Contest Blog

Szymborska's Will Calls for New Literary Prize

Some details of the legacy late Polish poet Wisława Szymborska hoped to leave writers of the future were revealed yesterday at the opening of her will in Krakow. According to Michal Rusinek, Szymborska's personal secretary, the Nobel Prize-winning poet had called for the establishment of a foundation, among the tasks of which would be to facilitate the creation of a new literary prize.

The nature of the prize was not illustrated in Szymborska's will. The foundation, which will assume care of Szymborska's papers and possessions, will be responsible for determining the type of prize and to whom it might be given.

Szymborska, whose last collection, Here (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was published in the United States in 2010, died on the first of this month at the age of eighty-eight.

The video below is an animated adaptation of Szymborska's poem "Advertisement," translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanaugh.

A Winner's Advice: Jennifer Perrine

Des Moines poet Jennifer Perrine has been a frequent feature in our Recent Winners pages over the past several years, due in no small part to the careful way she selects contests to enter and tracks presses' responses, and a willingness to dismantle and revise promising manuscripts until they transform into a perfect constellation.

In 2008 her debut collection, The Body Is No Machine (New Issues, 2007), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. Her second book, In the Human Zoo, was published by University of Utah Press last May as part of another award, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Perrine's poems have also won competitions sponsored by the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, Third Coast, Bellingham Review, the Ledge, and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg. The poet shared with us recently what she looks for in an contest, the true value of awards, and what not to expect from a writing competition.

What has inspired you to submit your work for particular awards?
Right now I’m most interested in contests that offer something unusual—something other than, or in addition to, a monetary award. I’m at a point now where I have two books in print, and awards that involve travel and readings seem like a particularly effective way to share those books with a wider audience. I also love awards that include travel because they expose me to new communities and landscapes and let me test out my curiosity in a new place. That sort of exploration inevitably leads me to write more poems—or at least, different poems.

I also have a particular fondness for letterpress and book arts, so I seek out contests sponsored by book arts centers or ones that award publication of poems as broadsides. Entering contests can be expensive, and I like the idea that whether I win or not, I’m helping to support this beautiful intersection of poetry and visual art.

I used to submit work quite often to more standard contests—ones that award a monetary prize and publication—but I do so less and less. After some early years of scattering poems to the wind and crossing my fingers, I started limiting myself to sending only to journals and presses that regularly publish poetry that I find pleasurable or challenging. More recently, because I’ve been on a tight budget, I’ve only been sending poetry to contests if I receive something in exchange for the entry fee—a year’s subscription to the journal, perhaps, or a copy of the book that bested the other eight hundred manuscripts. Like travel, exposure to great new poetry changes me, and that’s what I’m out to find—transformative experiences, not just something that will look good on a CV.

How did you know your manuscripts were ready to go out?
With individual poems, I tend to work on each one obsessively until I can’t think of any other possibilities to explore in the work. Then I send it out. I try to send it out at the point where I’m most excited about it; if I let poems sit too long while I move on to another project, I’ll start to gaze back on those older poems with hesitation or doubt. I’d rather put a poem into the world while I’m still surprised by what I’ve written, with the hope that some of that surprise will cling to the poem and reach the reader.

With book-length manuscripts, I take all my poems, spread them across the floor, and arrange them in various ways—removing some, inserting others—until I finally find some order that holds together as a book. I’m not necessarily looking for a theme, but usually patterns will emerge—recurring images, resonances between poems that were written months or years apart—that make the manuscript into something greater than the sum of its parts. I’ll submit a manuscript to several presses, note where it places as a finalist, and the next year I’ll repeat the process all over again, disassembling and rebuilding the manuscript until it finds its final incarnation—the one that a press turns into a book and sends out into the world. With each version of the manuscript, though, I always believe that those poems, ordered in that particular sequence, speak to each other in a way that creates constellations that are more illuminating when taken together and that aren’t dependent on a handful of standout stars.

Are you also submitting to publishers outside of competitions?
I submit individual poems outside of competitions all the time. I’ve also sent book-length manuscripts during the open reading periods to a couple of presses—Graywolf Press and Four Way Books—that I really love and that consistently publish great books.

It seems that many contests are geared toward publication of first or second books, so I’m sure I’ll be working out a new approach when I submit my next manuscript; I’ll inevitably be sending my work to more presses outside of competitions. That seems appropriate, though, because at this point in my writing life, I’m looking more for a press that wants to publish my work over the long haul than for the recognition a single prize confers.

Is there one prize that has been of particular value to you?
Really? You’re going to make me choose?

Again, the opportunity for travel is really important to me, so I’ve particularly appreciated the Mérida Fellowship Award from U.S. Poets in Mexico, during which I learned so much from fellow poets and from the people who live in and around Mérida; the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, which opened me to the natural wonders of Point Lobos, Big Sur, and Carmel-by-the-Sea, as well as the stone-cold beauty of Tor House; the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, which was especially delightful because I got to meet the students who juried the competition, so I knew that there were young writers reading my book and finding something worthwhile there; and the Writers at Work Fellowship, during which I spent every day awestruck by the mountains around Salt Lake City and worked every night on assembling the initial version of my first manuscript.

Other awards have meant a great deal to me for other reasons. Early awards from Gertrude, the Connecticut Poetry Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center came just after I had returned to college after dropping out for a couple of years. Those awards gave me some sense that I had made the right choice when I decided to spend more time reading and writing poetry, and less time selling donuts and CDs. At the other end of the spectrum, winning the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize was wonderful—it was such a relief to find a home for my second book and to know that my poetic muscles hadn’t atrophied after I finished graduate school and started teaching full-time. I know it sounds like a copout, but I value every award I’ve received because each one is a reminder that someone out there is reading my work with care and enthusiasm. I write through, about, and around events and ideas that are important to me; the gratification doesn’t come from the award itself, but from knowing that another human being values the same things I do. Each award reestablishes my connection to the reader, which I can sometimes forget when toiling away on a poem by myself.

What piece of advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
Decide what drives you to submit to contests. If you’re entering contests for affirmation or money, there are easier ways to earn both. Contests also aren’t the easiest way to get your work into the world; if you just want to get your work out there, you can start a blog, and you can self-publish your manuscript. If, on the other hand, you want to support journals and presses you love, submit work to them. If you have a strong desire to travel or to find a community of other poets, submit to contests that will lead you down that path.

Keep a tight rein on your ego and your envy. Be happy for your friends who win prizes, even—no, especially—if you were competing for the same award. Be gracious, and remember that you’re doing this for the love of poetry, not to be a superstar. If I’m wrong, and you do want to be a superstar, try out for a reality TV show—you’ll have a much larger audience.

Be organized. Make life easier on the contest readers—who are usually your fellow poets—by keeping track of your submissions, so you can notify them if you need to withdraw a piece.

Let your rejections feed your work. Use them as a reminder to keep writing, to keep revising, to keep sending more work out, knowing that one day your poetry will kindle a sense of connection in a reader, someone who will see your poems as kin and give them a home.

Whatever you do, don’t give up. Whatever you do, enjoy the work.

L.A. Times Names Finalists for Best Books of 2011

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times announced the shortlists for its 2011 Book Awards, given in ten categories including poetry, fiction, biography, and the graphic novel.

The finalists in poetry are Jim Harrison for Songs of Unreason (Copper Canyon Press), Dawn Lundy Martin for Discipline (Nightboat Books), Linda Norton for The Public Gardens (Pressed Wafer), and 2011 National Book Award finalists Carl Phillips for Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press), which is also on the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award shortlist.

In fiction, Joseph O’Connor is shortlisted for Ghost Light (Frances Coady Books), Michael Ondaatje for The Cat’s Table (Knopf), and Alex Shakar for Luminarium (Soho Press), as well as National Book Award finalists Julie Otsuka, for The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf), and Edith Pearlman, for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books). Debut authors up for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction are Chad Harbach for The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown), Eleanor Henderson for Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), Ben Lerner for Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press), Ismet Prcic for Shards (Black Cat), and James Wallenstein for The Arriviste (Milkweed Editions).

Up for the graphic novel honor are Joseph Lambert for I Will Bite You! And Other Stories (Secret Acres), Dave McKean for Celluloid (Fantagraphics), Carla Speed McNeil for Finder: Voice (Dark Horse), Jim Woodring for Congress of the Animals (Fantagraphics), and Yuichi Yokoyama for Garden (PictureBox). The award, the first major literary award given for the graphic novel form, is now in its third year.

Representing creative nonfiction on the biography shortlist are Alexandra Styron's memoir Reading My Father: A Memoir (Scribner) and Mark Whitaker's My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir (Simon & Schuster). The late biographer Manning Marable, whose Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking) was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and is shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is also nominated in the biography category.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony on April 20, just prior to this year's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which comes to the University of Southern California on April 21 and 22. Alongside the winners, the Times will honor novelist Rudolfo Anaya, who debuted in 1972 with the novel Bless Me, Ultima (Quinto Sol Publications), with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

In the video below, Anaya reads from his novel Albuquerque (Warner Books, 1994) and discusses the importance of place to a writer.

Tin House's Plotto Contest Moves on to Week Three

Tin House Books rolls out the third installment of its fiction-prompt contest, "calling all writers who are obsessed with plot and obsessives who can write a mean story."

The weekly competition extracts a story-starter from William Wallace Cook's Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, originally published in 1923 and rereleased by Tin House last December, and invites writers to take a stab at creating a five-hundred word piece of flash fiction based on the prompt.

Entries are due each Monday (there's no fee to enter), and the winning story will be published on Tin House's Open Bar blog. Last week's champion, for a story that builds off the dilemma of a locked hotel room door, is Richard Osgood, "whose wild take on the situation," according to the Tin Housers, "had us thinking of Becker, David Lynch, and highway obstructionists."

Here's a look at this week's challenge, where {A} is the male protagonist and {B} is the female: "{A’s} profession is a hazardous one—aviator, automobile racing driver, steeple jack, “human fly”—and {B} considers this fact an obstacle to their marriage." The complete contest guidelines are posted on the Plotto contest page.

Pushcart's Winningest Magazines

The Pushcart Prizes, given annually since 1976 for poems, stories, and essays published by literary magazines and indie outfits, purport to highlight the "best of the small presses" in a yearly anthology.

Looking to apply some objective analysis to the results (and determine, by Pushcart standards, where his own fiction might be in the most distinguished company), one writer has taken to tracking winning venues over the years.

Since 2008 Clifford Garstang, author of the story collection In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009) and editor of Prime Number Magazine, has looked back at the past ten years of Pushcart anthologies and calculated the most-honored magazines, using a system that awards points for Pushcart wins and honorable mentions. The results for 2012, broken out by genre, were reported last week his Perpetual Folly blog.

This year's tally saw Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review taking top slots across all three genres, with Conjunctions ranking in the top five in both fiction and nonfiction. Poetry was the front-runner in its genre of specialization. Big movers in fiction, in relation to Garstang's 2011 rankings, were A Public Space and One Story. In nonfiction, Harvard Review and n+1 made jumps this year, tied for thirty-second place. (Small presses make a lesser showing, though BOA Editions holds the fifteenth spot in poetry.)

Garstang admits that ten-year retrospective he takes naturally favors older journals, as well as magazines that appear in print (only one online journal was highlighted in the 2012 award anthology). "Pushcart has for several years been criticized for discriminating against online magazines," Garstang writes on his blog. "Online magazines have made some inroads in the annual volume. I expect this will accelerate and the problem will correct itself. We shall see. In the meantime, for those of us who submit work to online journals—some of which are excellent—we have to look elsewhere for measures of quality."

For more information about the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology, visit the prize website.

University Lit Mag Launches Fiction Contest

Barely South Review, the literary journal of the MFA program at Virginia's Old Dominion University, has announced its first writing contest.

The Norton Girault Literary Prize for fiction, which will alternate annually with awards in poetry and creative nonfiction, offers one thousand dollars and publication in Barely South.

The 2012 judge is Cristina García, whose debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (Knopf), was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. Her other novels include The Agüero Sisters (Knopf, 1997), Monkey Hunting (Knopf, 2003), A Handbook to Luck (Knopf, 2007), and The Lady Matador's Hotel (Scribner, 2010).

Fiction writers may submit a story of up to 25 pages via snail mail or Submittable, the online submission system, until February 29. Results will be announced in April.

Ploughshares Launches Tri-Genre Emerging Writer's Contest

Starting yesterday, forty-year-old literary journal Ploughshares began accepting entries for a new writing contest open to unpublished poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.

The Emerging Writer's Contest, an expansion of last year's inaugural competition in fiction, will award one thousand dollars and publication to a writer in each genre.

In order to be considered "emerging," writers should not have published a book or chapbook in any form (self-published works included). Ploughshares invites potential entrants with eligibility questions to inquire via e-mail.

Poets may submit between three and five poems and prose writers may submit works of up to five thousand words along with a twenty-dollar entry fee, which includes a subscription to Ploughshares, until April 2. For complete guidelines and to access the submission manager, visit the journal's website.

The winner of the first contest was thirty-six-year-old Thomas Lee, for his story "The Gospel of Blackbird," which appears in the current issue of the magazine, alongside fiction by James Franco, William Giraldi, Ann Hood, and Rachel Kadish. Sample works from the issue, guest edited by Alice Hoffman, are accessible online.

Timothy Donnelly Wins $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

The Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of this year's Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, two of the more lucrative honors in the genre. The one-hundred-thousand-dollar Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given to a writer in midcareer, went to New York City poet Timothy Donnelly for his second collection, The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books). Donnelly, whose first book, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of "Eine Lebenszeit," was published in 2003 by Grove Press, has also published widely in journals such as A Public Space, the Nation, and the Paris Review.

Debut poet Katherine Larson of Tucson, Arizona, received the ten-thousand-dollar Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press). Larson's book was published in 2011 as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize the previous year, selected by Louise Glück.

The finalists for the Kingsley Tufts prize were Ed Roberson for To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press) and Christian Wiman for Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Finalists for the debut award were Julie Hanson for Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press) and Shane McCrae for Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center).

Serving as the final judges for the award were poets David Barber, Kate Gale, Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, and Carl Phillips. The preliminary judges were poets Jericho Brown, Andrew Feld, and Suji Kwock Kim.

The winners will be feted on April 19 at a ceremony in Claremont, California, presided over by poet Maxine Hong Kingston.

The video below was filmed at Donnelly's Cloud Corporation release party at the offices of A Public Space in Brooklyn, New York.

Naomi Long Madgett First Woman to Win Eminent Artist Award

The Detroit-based Kresge Foundation has awarded its 2012 Eminent Artist Award to Naomi Long Madgett, poet laureate of the city and author of ten poetry collections. Also a teacher and the founder of forty-year-old Lotus Press, Madgett received the fifty-thousand-dollar prize in honor of her contributions to poetry as well as her work promoting African American literature.

Foundation president Rip Rapson called Madgett "the embodiment of what it means to be an eminent artist," praising the poet for pursuing "a life of creativity while supporting other writers and poets, reaching across generations to spark in young people a love of words and writing, and maintaining a deep and abiding to commitment to the Detroit community."

"I've worked all my life trying to help people, poets and students," Madgett says. "I think we are here to serve. There’s a hymn'If I Can Help Somebody'that goes, 'If I can help somebody, as I pass along, then my living shall not be in vain.' It makes me very happy to leave a legacy of words that other people can relate to."

Previous winners of the Eminent Artist Award include poet and playwright Bill Harris, jazz trumpet player Marcus Belgrave, and visual artist Charles McGee, all of Detroit. The winners are nominated by an advisory council and selected by an independent panel, which this year included musicians Larry Gabriel and James E. Hart; Rebecca Mazzei, deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Robin Terry, chairman and executive director of the Motown Historical Museum; and Marilyn Wheaton, director of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum.

Below is a video poem of Madgett's "Alabama Centennial," originally collected in the book Star by Star, published by Detroit's Harlo Press in 1965.

PEN American Center's Big Deadline Approaches

The closing date is less than a week away for New York City-based PEN American Center's literary competitions for poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and translators.

The five-thousand-dollar Open Book Award is given for a book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction by an author of color. Award alumni include poets Harryette Mullen and Willie Perdomo, fiction writer Victor LaValle, and creative nonfiction writer Joy Harjo.

In fiction, the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize offers twenty-five thousand dollars for a first novel or story collection published in 2011. Danielle Evans, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Monique Truong are among past winners.

Essayists may enter the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, which awards five thousand dollars for a collection published in 2011. Last year's winner was Mark Slouka for Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (Graywolf Press, 2010).

In translation, several awards are offered, including grants of between two and ten thousand dollars each for unpublished translations. One three-thousand dollar prize competition is open specifically to published translations of poetry, another to works in any genre.

PEN also gives prizes in biography, children's and young adult literature, sports writing, science writing, and drama. For more information and guidelines, visit the organization's website.

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