Archive June 2012

For the month of July, P&W–supported poet and director of literary events, Randall Horton, blogs about his work with various organizations and events throughout the northeast. Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, and the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

Black Lawrence Press is currently offering a reduced entry fee for the St. Lawrence Book Award, a prize given annually for an unpublished collection of poems or short stories. For today and tomorrow only, the fee is fifteen dollars; after tomorrow, June 30, the standard fee of twenty-five-dollars will apply.

Poet and fiction writer Tim Z. Hernandez blogs about two workshops he led on May 2 at libraries in Stockton, California, as part of a Rural Library Tour partnership between Poets & Writers and the California Center for the Book.

Writing fiction in the first-person plural is notoriously tricky. Challenge yourself to write a short story—or a section of a short story—from the first-person plural. Read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” for insight on how a collective narrator can enhance a story and/or produce unexpected effects.

In a 2008 Paris Review interview with Kay Ryan, she explains her neologism “recombinant rhyme”—a craft technique of stashing “rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middle.” According to Ryan, “snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem” allows her to “get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.” Take a poem of yours that could use more musicality, and revise it to include recombinant rhyme.

The erasure is a poetic form created by obscuring words and phrases from an existing text and using those that remain to construct a poem. Apply the erasure to an essay. Make a copy of three or four pages of your favorite essay. Then, using a black marker or Wite-out, compose a short lyric essay by selecting certain words on the pages and erasing the rest.

The American Library Association awarded its inaugural Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Literature at a ceremony last night in Anaheim, California.

Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award went this year to debut novelist Anna Funder for her best-seller All That I Am (Harper).

New York City's Center for Fiction, which annually honors writers with its Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Clifton Fadiman Medal, is accepting entries for a new short story contest.

Write a nonfiction piece of no more than 500 words. It could be anything from a single scene to a complete micro essay—either way, try to utilize the same techniques and structure that you would for a full-length piece. For inspiration, check out Brevity, an online journal dedicated to the art of flash nonfiction.

Aquarius Press/Willow Books at the Virgil Carr Cultural Center in Detroit

Black Lawrence Press Offers Early-Bird Special

Tim Z. Hernandez on the Teenage Poet Laureate of Stockton

We the People

Recombinant Rhyme

Erasure Essay

ALA Gives First Awards for Adult Literature

Debut Novelist Wins Major Australian Award

The Center for Fiction Holds Story Contest

Flash Nonfiction