How would it feel to move through a landscape where the most distinguishing features are missing? The artist Cory Arcangel created a unique environment like this with his piece Super Mario Clouds by altering the code of the video game Super Mario Brothers and removing all the graphics except for the iconic scrolling clouds. This week, try setting a short story in a location that has been ominously stripped of its usual characteristics: a forest with no trees, a supermarket with nothing on the shelves, a city with no humans. Will this setting create an eerie tone or inspire an altered way of life?

In her book Madame X (Canarium Books, 2012), Darcie Dennigan uses ellipses throughout her poems, which drastically alter their shape and texture. This week, try writing your own poem that employs ellipses. Do you find yourself writing in a different rhythm or omitting more words with this tool? There is something mysterious and suggestive about ellipses, as if a truth is being hinted at but not fully revealed. Perhaps this quality has a place in your poem. 

Poets, do you have a poem, chapbook, or full-length collection ready to submit? There’s still time to enter the following contests, which offer prizes ranging from $500 to $10,000 and publication. The contests are all open for submissions until February 28 or March 1.

Deadline: February 28

Association of Writers & Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry: A prize of $5,500 and publication by University of Pittsburgh Press is given annually for a poetry collection. Ross Gay will judge. Entry fee: $30

National Poetry Series Open Competition: Five prizes of $10,000 each and publication by participating trade, university, or small press publishers are given annually for poetry collections. Publishers include Beacon Press, Ecco, Milkweed Editions, Penguin Books, and University of Georgia Press. Entry fee: $30

Deadline: March 1

Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Atlanta Review is given annually for a poem. Entry fee: $12

Tusculum Review Chapbook Contest: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Tusculum Review is given annually for a poetry chapbook. Emilia Phillips will judge. Entry fee: $20

42 Press 42 Miles Poetry Award: A prize of $1,000, publication by 42 Miles Press, and 50 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. David Dodd Lee will judge. Entry fee: $25

Broadside Lotus Press Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award: A prize of $500 and publication by Broadside Lotus Press is given annually for a poetry collection by an African American poet. No entry fee.

Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize: A prize of $1,500, publication by Ahsahta Press, and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. Jennifer Moxley will judge. Entry fee: $25

Airlie Press Airlie Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication by Airlie Press will be given annually for a poetry collection. The editors will judge. Entry fee: $25

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out our Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more upcoming contests in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Mary Ruefle’s essay “My Search Among the Birds” takes the form of short diary entries, all relating to birds. The entries each begin with a date and range from simple descriptions (“I saw a bird in the bushes near Dairy Queen. It looked thin to me.”) to more inward reflections (“Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.”). This week, try taking daily notes on a specific subject that will allow you to observe and be introspective. It could be anything: cellphones, airplanes, mice, socks. See where this act of sustained attention leads you, and craft your entries into an essay.

Last night PEN America announced the winners of its 2018 Literary Awards. The annual awards, which this year totaled more than $350,000, are given for books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation published in the previous year. Below are the winners of a select few prizes.

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Layli Long Soldier won the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her debut poetry collection, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). The award is given for a book of any genre for its “originality, merit, and impact.”

Jenny Zhang won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for her story collection, Sour Heart (Lenny). The prize is given for a first novel or story collection. Mia Alvar, Rion Amilcar Scott, Justin Torres, and Claire Vaye Watkins judged.

Alexis Okeowo won the PEN Open Book Award for her nonfiction book, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa (Hachette). The award is given for book of any genre by a writer of color. Eduardo C. Corral, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Amy Quan Barry judged.

Len Rix won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Hungarian of Magda Szabó’s novel Katalin Street (NYRB Classics). The prize is given for a book-length translation of prose from any language into English. Eric M. B. Becker, Lisa Hayden, Jenny Wang Medina, Denise Newman, and Lara Vergnaud judged.

The late Ursula K. Le Guin won the $10,000 Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for her essay collection No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Vinson Cunningham, James Fallows, and Gillian Tett judged.

Edmund White received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and Edna O’Brien received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Both awards are given for a body of work.

Visit the PEN website for a complete list of winners and finalists.

Photos: Layli Long Soldier, Jenny Zhang, Alexis Okeowo

February 26 is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day. To honor the occasion, try writing your own fairy tale with a contemporary twist. If you need some inspiration, examples abound of stories influenced by the magical logic and archetypes of fairy tales. In Robert Coover’s “The Frog Prince,” for example, a woman marries a frog and kissing him offers her a hallucinogenic experience. The anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin Books, 2010), edited by Kate Bernheimer with Carmen Giménez Smith, is filled with diverse approaches to the retelling of classic fairy tales. What elements of modern life or progressive point of view will you incorporate into your tale? 

Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. She received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at MECA International Art Fair in Puerto Rico, Sullivan Galleries, TCC Chicago, and Locust Projects and has been published in Container, Calamity, Vinyl Poetry, Bear Review, and Hypertext Magazine. She is a teaching artist for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s creative literacy residency program in Chicago public schools, Hands on Stanzas, and curates and hosts the Six Points Reading Series.

The Poetry Center of Chicago (PCC) was founded in 1974, and we work hard to promote poetry in Chicago through readings, workshops, and arts education. Something that I have been working on at PCC is to offer more workshops for adults. Last year, we had a poetry and dance workshop with Ana Castillo and the nonprofit organization Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, thanks to the generous support of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program. With this continued support, I was able to organize a morning workshop with poet Kaveh Akbar as well as an evening reading and discussion with him and Tarfia Faizullah that took place on January 26. 

The workshop sign-up was open to the public and took place at Loyola University Chicago. We had twenty-three participants from all kinds of backgrounds, ages, and places in the city. Kaveh Akbar opened up the workshop by discussing the unique architecture of our psychic algorithms and how this allows us to create a restorative experience of language that is uniquely our own. He led two activities to be used as sustainable tools for the writing practice.

The first activity incorporated a “bibliomanic” response in which each participant picked words from poetry books that stood out to them. After acquiring a pile of dazzling words and ideas, the participants were able to craft their own poems and the responses were energetic, playful, and provocative. The second activity was the “one-word story.” In groups of three, two participants began a poem by saying one word at a time and the third participant acted as the scribe. Again, the activity was a trust of the psyche as opposed to any premeditated plan. Akbar stressed how certainty is the death of a poem and how we should trust our reflexive responses.

The workshop participants and the PCC staff had a wonderful experience. One of the participants noted: “He was a great teacher—full of curiosity and fun, and he shared that infectiously with us. Akbar’s prompts were really wonderful, they allowed me to get into writing immediately, and led to a great output of work for myself, and it seemed, for others too. I’m so grateful the center was able to offer this workshop for free.”

In the evening, both poets opened by reading Chicago poets. Tarfia Faizullah read a poem from Fatimah Asghar’s forthcoming debut collection, If They Come for Us (One World, 2018), and Akbar read “off white” by Nate Marshall, before reading from their own collections along with some new work.

Thanks to the support of a micro grant from Illinois Humanities, we were able to have the poets lead a discussion following the reading. Akbar used the space to interview Faizullah about her new book and the discussion lead to questions about Muslim identity, epigenetics, and when to address the self. The audience contributed questions and feedback that pulled us toward the roots of each poet’s work. It made for an evening of honest, warm, and powerful celebrations of poetry and the community that builds it together.

Editor’s Note: For more on Kaveh Akbar, read “The Whole Self: Our Thirteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. You can also hear Tarfia Faizullah read from her new poetry collection, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), in the eighteenth episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

Support for Readings & Workshops in Chicago is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Many cultures have expressions to describe the phenomenon of sunshowers. In Japan, a sunshower is said to mean that foxes are getting married; in Iran, that a wolf is giving birth; and in the United States, that the devil is beating his wife. In her poem “Sunshower,” Natalie Shapero uses this American expression as a refrain and twists it in a way that critiques both the saying and the culture it represents. Using Shapero’s poem as a model, try taking one of the many cultural expressions for a sunshower and use it as a refrain for a poem. Begin with the words: “Some people say…” 

Prose writers! There’s no time like the present to submit your best short stories, essay collections, and novel manuscripts to the following contests with deadlines of February 28 and March 1. The contests all offer publication and cash prizes ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. Good luck!

Deadline: February 28

Glimmer Train Press Short Story Award for New Writers: A prize of $2,500, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 20 author copies is given three times a year for a short story by a writer whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5,000. Entry fee: $18

Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize: A prize of €1,000 (approximately $1,240) and publication in the Fish Publishing anthology is given annually for a short short story. Sherrie Flick will judge. Entry fee: $17

Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication by Red Hen Press is given annually for a book of fiction or nonfiction by a woman. Lidia Yuknavitch will judge. Entry fee: $25

Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing: A prize of $10,000 and publication by Restless Books is given in alternating years for a debut book of fiction or nonfiction by a first-generation immigrant. The 2018 prize will be given in fiction. Writers who have not published a book of fiction with a U.S. publisher are eligible. No entry fee.

Deadline: March 1

Mad Creek Books Journal Non/Fiction Collection Prize:  A prize of $1,500 and publication by Mad Creek Books, the trade imprint of Ohio State University Press, is given annually for a collection of short prose. Michelle Herman will judge. Entry fee: $25

Selected Shorts Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize: A prize of $1,000 and tuition for a 10-week writing class through New York City’s Gotham Writers Workshop is given annually for a short story. The winning work will be published in Electric Literature and recorded live at a Selected Shorts performance at Symphony Space in New York City in June. Jess Walter will judge. Entry fee: $25

Hidden River Arts Tuscarora Award in Historical Fiction: A prize of $1,000 and publication by Hidden River Press will be given annually for a book of historical fiction. Entry fee: $22

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out our Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more upcoming contests in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.