Can you remember the last time you handwrote a lengthy text? The Magic of Handwriting, an exhibit currently on view at the Morgan Library in New York City, showcases a collection of handwritten documents and autographs acquired by Brazilian author and publisher Pedro Corrêa do Lago. The exhibition includes intimate inscriptions by Jorge Luis Borges, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde, among others. Write a personal essay about how your own handwriting has changed from childhood, through adolescence and adulthood. What memories are brought to mind when looking at your old handwriting? Perhaps try handwriting the first draft of your essay to help connect back into this practice.

Imagine a town with no Wi-Fi, no cell phones or cordless phones, where microwaves are kept in metal cages, and only 1950s and diesel engine cars are allowed on the road. All of these are real restrictions in Green Bank, a tiny West Virginia town situated inside a designated National Radio Quiet Zone, where data collection by astronomers at the observatory can be disrupted by the presence of electronic interference. Write a short story in which your main character resides in a town with similar restrictions. Is living off the grid a choice? How do the daily tasks and communication of your character differ without the convenience of the tools and technology we often take for granted?

The Academy of American Poets has announced that Sonia Sanchez has received the 2018 Wallace Stevens Award, which is given annually to “recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Sanchez will receive $100,000.

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“Sonia Sanchez is our peerless griot of American poetry,” says Terrance Hayes, a chancellor of the Academy. “There is no poet like her in the whole motley canon. There may have never been a more appropriate recipient of an award honoring poetic mastery and originality.” Sanchez, who was chosen by the chancellors of the Academy, has written more than a dozen poetry collections that address ideas of womanhood, black culture, and more. Her most recent collection is Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010).

The Academy announced all of the winners of the 2018 American Poets Prizes today, including Sanchez. Martín Espada has won the $25,000 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes “distinguished poetic achievement” and includes a residency at the Eliot summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Martín Espada is a poet of musical richness, passion, high and low comedy, imagistic vibrance, wild metaphor, and storytelling skill, with a sense of history,” says chancellor Alicia Ostriker. “He is a celebrant of love and a persistent troubler of the waters. As a ‘people’s poet’ he has been called North America’s Neruda.”

Craig Morgan Teicher received the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his collection The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions, 2017); the annual award is given for the best book of poetry published in the United States during the previous year. Laura Kasischke, Campbell McGrath, and Mary Szybist judged. “The Trembling Answers is a collection as ecstatic as it is solemn, and what this poetry shares with us about love, faith, doubt, and poetry itself is essential,” says Szybist.

Geffrey Davis has won the James Laughlin Award for his collection Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019). The $5,000 award, which includes a weeklong residency at the Betsy Hotel in Miami, is given annually for a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year.

Raquel Salas Rivera won the $1,000 Ambroggio Prize for the collection x/ex/exis (poemas para la nación) (poems for the nation), and David Larsen won the $1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation of Ibn Khālawayh’s Names of the Lion (Wave Books, 2017). Anthony Molino won the $10,000 Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize for his translation of Paolo Febbraro’s The Diary of Kaspar Hauser (Negative Capability Press, 2017).

Read more about the winners on the Academy of American Poets website.

Gardens, forests, hills, fields, wild pink flowers, a farmhouse, a writer’s shed, birds. There is much inspiration to be found at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s former home in Austerlitz, New York, which is open to the public. Visitors can even peek into Millay’s wardrobe to see her shoes, hats, purses, makeup, dresses, and hunting jacket. In “Saving Millay’s Home” by Adrienne Raphel in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, she writes about Millay’s house and other writers’ homes in the region including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Edith Wharton’s estate, the Mark Twain House, Herman Melville’s home, and several of Robert Frost’s homes. Browse through writers’ homes in our Literary Places database for one of your favorites, or simply one whose photographs capture your imagination. Write a poem that draws on images you find, the writer’s work and milieu, and themes of home, geography, and legacy.

“One of the most surprising responses to my book came from my mother. She said above all what the poems illustrated to her is that anyone can be a monster to any number of people—even if they don’t intend to act in ways that harm,” writes Diana Arterian in an essay on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet. Write an essay about a time when you were caught off guard by a surprising or unusual response to your creative writing, perhaps by someone close to you. How did this unexpected, or unintended, reaction offer a new perspective into your own work? 

How did your neighborhood get its name? Was it christened by long-ago settlers or spread slowly by local gossipers or journalists? Or might it have been cartographers at Google Maps, which often lists neighborhood names with seemingly no recognizable origin or historical basis, such as East Cut in San Francisco, Fishkorn in Detroit (a typographical error from what was formerly known as Fiskhorn), Midtown South Central in New York City, or Silver Lake Heights in Los Angeles. Invent a descriptive name for a fictional town. Then, write a short story based around the origin of this name. Does the geography or a consequential event play a part in the name and story?

In “Why Songs of the Summer Sound the Same,” a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma break down summer hit songs from years past into several key shared elements: danceability, energy, loudness, valence (cheerfulness), and acousticness (use of acoustic instruments). This week, write a poem about your summer that incorporates some of these hit song elements. Can you induce danceability in verse form? How might you play around with typography, punctuation, spacing, or diction to create a sense of loudness or acousticness? 

Submissions are currently open for the Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Poetry Contest, given for a single poem. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in OmniVerse, Omnidawn Publishing’s online journal. The winner also receives fifty copies of a letterpress broadside of the winning poem. Dean Rader will judge.

Submit a poem of 8 to 24 lines with a $10 entry fee ($5 for each additional poem) by August 20. Writers may submit using the online submission system or via post to Omnidawn Publishing, 1632 Elm Avenue, Richmond, CA 94805.  The winner will be announced in December and published in April 2019. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Previous winners include Beatrice Szymkowiak for her poem “Yangtze Baiji Expedition Log” and Anca Roncea for her poem “Turns.”

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Judge Dean Rader is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and the chapbook, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn, 2013). He is also the coeditor of the anthologies Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Bullets Into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press, 2017), as well as the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry (99: The Press, 2014).

Established in 2001, Omnidawn Publishing publishes poetry and prose that seeks to “open readers anew to the myriad ways that language may bring new light, insight, awareness, as well as a heightened respect for and appreciation of differences.” The press has published poets Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Craig Santos Perez, and among others. 

As part of its 2018 exhibition season focused on the future, the Rubin museum in New York City has a program for visitors to write a letter to an incoming museumgoer. The letter may provide directions or insights that could potentially transform the future visitor’s own museum experience. This week, after completing an activity such as going to an art show, watching a movie, or eating at a restaurant, write a letter to a hypothetical follower in your footsteps. Include your emotional responses and personal memories, and any suggestions or recommendations that might offer guidance for the experience.