In late February, frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians responding to early warm temperatures began migrating from their winter hideouts to vernal pools to begin the spring mating season. Some of the animals were chaperoned to safety by concerned volunteers across trafficked streets late at night in New York and other Northeastern states. Write an essay about a time in your life when you made a big decision or took a leap. Did someone arrive to accompany you or were you on your own? Was your emotional journey guided by a crossing guard who brought you to safety? 

In “The Emotional Realist Talks to Ghosts” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, George Saunders discusses the different stages of writing his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017). The long process included attempting a third-person version of the story, as well as a play. Though neither form was quite right, Saunders says, “It made me more convinced that there was definitely a story there.” Take a short story in progress and rewrite one particular scene in two new forms—from a different narrative point of view, and in a dramatic script format. What are the main ideas that remain consistent and integral to the story throughout all three versions?

A salt lake in Melbourne, Australia recently turned pink due to the growth of algae “in response to very high salt levels, high temperatures, sunlight, and lack of rainfall.”  The phenomenon transformed the lake from its natural blue tone to an unusually bright flamingo color. Write a poem that begins by evoking the sensations of one color, and then—gradually or abruptly—turns a strikingly different color, perhaps even pink. How will you manipulate the mood, images, sounds, and rhythms of your language to reflect the color change? 

Do you have a work of fiction or nonfiction ready to submit? Get this week started by submitting to the following contests—which offer prizes of up to $10,000 and have deadlines within the next two weeks.

Colorado Review Nelligan Prize: A prize of $2,000 and publication in Colorado Review is given annually for a short story. Richard Bausch will judge.
Deadline: March 14
Entry Fee: $17

Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest: A prize of $10,000 is given for an essay. Two $2,500 runner-up prizes will also be awarded. The winning essays will be published in Creative Nonfiction. The theme for the contest is “Dangerous Creations: Real-life Frankenstein Stories.”
Deadline: March 20
Entry Fee: $20

Ruminate William Van Dyke Short Story Prize: A prize of $1,500 and publication in Ruminate is given annually for a short story. 
Deadline: March 15
Entry Fee: $20

The Pinch Literary Awards: Two prizes of $1,000 each and publication in the Pinch are given annually for a short story and an essay. Caitlin Horrocks will judge in fiction and Jill Talbot will judge in nonfiction.
Deadline: March 15
Entry Fee: $20

James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship: A prize of $10,000 is given annually for a novel-in-progress by a U.S. writer who has not published a novel. A selection from the winning work will be published in Provincetown Arts. Runners-up will each receive $1,000.
Deadline: March 15
Entry Fee: $30

Southampton Review Frank McCourt Memoir Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Southampton Review is given annually for a personal essay. 
Deadline: March 15
Entry Fee: $15

Prairie Schooner Book Prize: A prize of $3,000 and publication by University of Nebraska Press is given annually for a short story collection. An editorial board will select finalists; Kwame Dawes will serve as final judge.
Deadline: March 15
Entry Fee: $20

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

Micah Zevin is a librarian poet living in Jackson Heights, New York with his wife, a playwright. He works for the Queens Library and has recently published poems in the Best American Poetry Blog, Headlock Press, the Otter, Newtown Literary Journal and Blog, Poetry and Politics, Reality Beach, Jokes Review, Post (Blank), the Tower Journal, and the American Journal of Poetry. Zevin received his MFA in Poetry from the New School in 2014 and is the founder and curator of the Risk of Discovery Reading Series, now at Blue Cups in Woodside, New York.

Shortly after graduating from the New School, I started to think about how I could continue the same sense of community, support, creative energy, and stimulation that I received from my fellow students and professors. I saw a post on Facebook that was searching for someone to host and curate a reading series/open mic at a new comedy and creative venue in Astoria. The idea was to feature a diverse mix of Queens and non-Queens-based writers, and get local writers from my New School MFA connections and on social media to bring another reading series to the often overlooked borough of Queens and its budding literary scene, which happens to be my home and birthplace.

The “Risk” and “Discovery” in the reading series title was inspired by essays on writing by Yusef Komunyakaa, which emphasize the surprise that can come in one’s writing when challenging subjects or ideas are tackled in an unorthodox or imaginative way. At the most recent incarnation of my reading series, I give my attendees a handout with poetry prompts that asks them to write instant poems (the discovery), and then read them aloud (the risk). These poetry prompts have also been an effective way to jumpstart my own writing and bring things out of me from angles and perspectives that wouldn’t have otherwise been extracted or mined. Featured readers, such as Mathew Yeager, Nicole Goodwin, and Ryan Black, have taken the challenge and read their “instant poems” aloud.

Joanna Fuhrman was a featured poet for our February 21 event, and upcoming events include poets Matthew Hupert and Bill Lessard on March 21, and Uche Nduka and Francine Witte on April 18 during poetry month.

Featured poets who are paid an honorarium are thrilled that this reading series has received grants from the Readings & Workshops Program at Poets & Writers, which encourages writers to travel and go on tours to promote their collections. The option to pay featured readers attracts a wide range of writers to my reading series, and it has grown and built a regular audience over the last three years.

The Poets & Writers Literary Events Calendar is the perfect place to post information about the series and upcoming featured writers, and posts can be shared on social media.

Ultimately, running a reading series, despite organizational and logistical challenges, is a rewarding experience because it connects writers and literary enthusiasts with one another, and helps build a network in the borough of Queens and beyond.

Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis and Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

Rick Bass has been named the winner of the thirteenth annual Story Prize for his collection For a Little While (Little, Brown). The award honors an outstanding collection of short fiction published in the United States in the previous year, and comes with a $20,000 purse.

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Over the course of the last year, Jorge Otero-Pailos, a Columbia University professor and preservation expert, and a group of his graduate students have been collaborating with the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a project studying the smell of old books, furniture, and more. The library was built in 1906 by John Pierpont Morgan to house his rare books and art collection, and is one of the premier repositories in the world. Write an essay about a place that you have spent a considerable amount of time in—perhaps somewhere you lived or worked before—and whose smells are curiously linked with your recollection. Describe the emotions and events from that period that those smells conjure up, and the ways in which your memories may have been colored by your preference or distaste of those smells.

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation,” writes Margaret Atwood in her 2000 novel The Blind Assassin. Write a short story in which one segment involves a main character imagining another character imagining him. You may decide to differentiate this segment by setting apart the text in italics, or explicitly stating that it is imagined, or perhaps you may decide to blur the line between real and imagined. In what ways does this line of thought help your character through a conflict or obstacle? What does this insight tell us about how he perceives himself in relation to others?

Today the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced the five finalists for its 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The $15,000 prize is given annually for a work of fiction published in the United States in the previous year. Four finalists will each receive $5,000.

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The finalists are: After Disasters (Little A) by Viet Dinh, LaRose (Harper) by Louise Erdrich, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, Behold the Dreamers (Random House) by Imbolo Mbue, and Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Lee Boudreaux Books) by Sunil Yapa.

All the finalists except for Erdrich are debut novelists. Judges Chris Abani, Chantel Acevedo, and Sigrid Nunez selected the finalists from a pool of approximately five hundred books. The winner will be announced April 4, and the awards ceremony will be held May 6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Now in its thirty-seventh year, the PEN/Faulkner Award bills itself as the “largest peer-juried award in the country.” For more information about the prize and finalists, visit the PEN/Faulkner Foundation website.

(Photos from left: Viet Dinh, Louise Erdrich, Garth Greenwell, Imbolo Mbue, Sunil Yapa)

If you read, in order, the last word of each line in Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Golden Shovel,” you will discover that they are the words of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the inspiration for Hayes’s poem. Select one or more lines from a poem you admire, and write your own “Golden Shovel” poem. Use each word from the source text in its original order for the last word in each line of your new poem. When you are finished, the end-words of your poem should trace out the origin poem. Be sure to add a note crediting the poet whose line(s) you’ve used.