Poets & Writers Blogs

The Story Prize announced today the shortlist for its seventh annual award, an honor worth twenty thousand dollars. The finalists are Anthony Doerr for his fourth book, Memory Wall (Scribner); Yiyun Li for her third book, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House); and Suzanne Rivecca for her debut, Death Is Not an Option (Norton), all of whom have received support from multiple sources that has bolstered their writing.

Doerr, author of the short story collection The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, is a recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also received the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award in 2003 for The Shell Collector.

Li, who received the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship last September, is also recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. From abroad, she has been recognized by the Munster Literature Centre with its Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and by the Guardian, with its First Book Award, for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. She is also the author of The Vagrants, a novel.

Currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Boston, Rivecca has also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and spent time as a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

John Freeman, editor of Granta; author Jayne Anne Phillips; and Marie du Vaure, book buyer for California's Vroman's Bookstore will select the winner to be announced live on March 2 at an event (open to the ticket-holding public) in New York City. The runners up will each receive five thousand dollars.

In the video below, Doerr discusses how his grandmother influenced his latest book, radio days, and the best time to write.

The Center for Fiction is currently accepting applications for a new grant and residency program designed for emerging fiction writers who reside in the five boroughs of New York City. Housed in a 1930s-era building in midtown Manhattan, the organization is offering eight fellowship awards of three thousand dollars each and one year of time to write in its writing studio (beginning on May 15) to non-student writers who have not published and are not under contract to publish a book.

In the studio, accessible seven days a week at all hours, each writing fellow is afforded a desk with the requisite outlets, Wi-Fi capability, and access to a wireless printer, as well as a locker. Writers can also make use of a reference library, lounge area, and kitchenette. The fellows will also be offered a mentorship with a freelance editor, a chance to participate in two readings, and free admission to the center's events and lectures.

Applications, which must be e-mailed, are due on January 31 and should contain a resumé, a work sample of up to ten thousand words, and proof of residency. Full guidelines are posted on the Center for Fiction Web site.

A consortium of indie outfits—the Journal of Experimental Fiction, the press Civil Coping Mechanisms, and trade publisher Pig Iron Press—are reintroducing the Kenneth Patchen Award, given for a novel that echoes the innovative spirit of the late fiction writer and poet. Created in the 1990s by Pig Iron, the prize offers one thousand dollars, publication of the winning novel manuscript, and twenty author copies to boot.

Submissions opened on January 1 and will be accepted until July 31. Entries should be sent as a Word document or PDF via e-mail, and must be accompanied by a twenty-five-dollar entry fee payable through PayPal; for complete guidelines, e-mail the Journal of Experimental Fiction. The winner, selected by Ukrainian American avant-garde writer Yuriy Tarnawsky, will be announced in September.

In the video below, Patchen reads his poetry amidst images of the writer's New York City. A contemporary of John Cage, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, Patchen is the author of more than forty books of poetry, prose, and drama including Before the Brave (1936), Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), and The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941).

Choose a favorite poem written by somebody else, type a copy of it, delete every other line from the poem, and write your own lines to replace those you’ve deleted. Next, delete the remaining lines from the old poem so that only your lines remain. Read what you have, and revise it, adding new lines to fill in the gaps.

Britain-based indie Holland Park Press is holding its first, free competition for a short story, with a prize of one hundred pounds sterling (roughly $150) and publication in the press's online magazine. The King of Tuzla Short Story Competition, named after the press's recently published novel by Dutch poet and fiction writer Arnold Jansen op de Haar, is open to stories set in a conflict zone similar to the one the author creates in his book, set during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (Tuzla is a city in Bosnia and Herzegovina that witnessed a civilian massacre in 1995).

Eligible stories, limited to one thousand words, should approach a narrative from the point of view of a single main character and must be set in the past or present, but not the future. "Your tale could unfold, for example, during the troubles in Northern Ireland," the press states in its guidelines. "It could just as well describe life in a refugee camp during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or take place in the present time inside a remote village in Afghanistan."

The deadline for entries is December 31, and stories must be sent via e-mail. Instructions on how to compile a submission are available on the press's Web site.

In the video below, King of Tuzla author Arnold Jansen op de Haar, also an ex-soldier, gives a tour of his writing space and reads from his published works.

Earlier this week, the Center for Fiction in New York City presented its (newly-renamed) Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize to a decorated veteran of the U.S. Marines whose debut novel tells a story informed by his time serving in Vietnam. Author Karl Marlantes received the ten-thousand-dollar award for his book, Matterhorn (Grove/Atlantic), selected by jurors Oscar Hijuelos, Sheila Kohler, John Pipkin, Dawn Raffel, and John Wray.

Also this week, United States Artists announced its 2010 fellows. Honored this year with awards of fifty thousand dollars each are poet Martín Espada, whose collection Trouble Ball is forthcoming in 2011 from Norton; poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, whose most recent book is Tocqueville (New Issues Poetry and Prose); poet Brighde Mullins, also a playwright, author of the chapbook Water Stories (Slapering Hol Press, 2003), and fiction writer Susan Steinberg, whose most recent short story collection is Hydroplane (Fiction Collective Two, 2006).

The awards honor artistic excellence in the field, determined by a panel of writers' peers. Fellowships are also given annually to playwrights, dramatists, filmmakers, visual artists, folk artists, and musicians—thirty in all this year.

In the video below, USA fellow Steinberg performs her story "Powerhouse" at a reading for the Rumpus.