G&A: The Contest Blog

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.

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yesterday, forty-year-old literary journal Ploughshares began accepting entries for a new writing contest open to unpublished poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.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

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.

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.

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.

Over the weekend the National Book Critics Circle revealed the contenders for its 2012 book awards, the only literary awards judged solely by book critics.

The finalists in poetry are:
Forrest Gander for Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
Aracelis Girmay for Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
Laura Kasischke for Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa for The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press), which was a finalist for last year's National Book Award

In fiction, the finalists are:
Teju Cole for his novel, Open City (Random House)
Jeffrey Eugenides for his novel The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Alan Hollinghurst for his novel The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books), a finalist for the National Book Award
Dana Spiotta for her novel Stone Arabia (Scribner)

In memoir, the finalists are:
Diane Ackerman for One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (Norton)
Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace (Free Press)
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts for Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
Luis J. Rodríguez for It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
Deb Olin Unferth for Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)

Among the finalists in nonfiction are John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Paris Review's southern editor and a contributing editor of Harper's, nominated for his essay collection, Pulphead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In the criticism category, novelist Jonathan Lethem got a nod for The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday).

The winners will be announced on March 8 at a ceremony at the New School University in New York City.

Two competitions that appeared in our January/February 2012 issue's Deadlines section are offering writers a bit of wiggle room to make contest submissions.

Third Coast magazine, which had originally set the deadline for its poetry and fiction contests at January 15, will now accept entries until January 31. The awards, given for a poem and a short story, include one thousand dollars and publication, and are judged by Major Jackson and Jaimy Gordon, respectively.

Literary nonprofit the Word Works, whose Washington Prize deadline has always fallen at the beginning of March, will accept poetry manuscript submissions until March 15, in an effort to offer some extra time for writers involved in this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. "The deadline was pushed in order to give folks attending AWP, which lands on and around March 1, our usual deadline, more time," says Word Works president Nancy White. "Getting ready for and recovering from a conference takes a lot of energy, so we were afraid submissions might get lost in the flurry for some people. Also, we love the chance to answer questions about the contest at our booth."

For more information about these awards and other upcoming deadlines, visit our searchable, sortable Grants & Awards database.