Choose a poem that you are in the process of revising. Draw a map of that poem, paying attention to the details of its landscape, its realities and abstractions, its landmarks, the spacial relationships among its features. Use the map to guide a revision of the initial work.

Last night the National Book Critics Circle celebrated its favorite books of 2010, announcing National Book Critics Circle Award winners in poetry, fiction, and autobiography. C. D. Wright took home the prize in poetry for One With Others (Copper Canyon), a work of verse journalism investigating the Civil Rights movement in the poet's native Arkansas.

"She’s developed a new form, if not a new genre," says NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher in a review of Wright's book, "that allows for a new blending of fact and feeling, one which could help us tell our stories going forward, if only we’ll let it school us."

In fiction, Jennifer Egan won in fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf). Board member Collette Bancroft says of Egan's time-leaping novel-in-stories, "A Visit From the Goon Squad wraps big themes—art and its relationship with technology, the fluid nature of the self, love and its loss—in stories with a satiric edge, believable but never predictable characters, and a range of styles masterfully rendered."

In autobiography, Darin Strauss won for Half a Life (McSweeney's Books), a memoir of the author's life after a devastating accident involving one of his high school classmates. "What might have been exploitative instead feels important, and dearly won," says board member Karen Long.

In the video below, filmed last week, Wright reads from her winning volume at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Abe's Penny, a "micro-magazine" that presents stories and poems serialized on postcards along with images, is looking for poems to accompany four series of photographs it will present in a Miami exhibition this April. The magazine will accept entries live at the New World School of the Arts' ArtSeen gallery on April 2, opening night of its exhibition featuring works by photographers Robby Campbell, Francie Bishop Good, Lee Materazzi, and Samantha Salzinger (and, incidentally, poetry readings by Gabby Calvocoressi and Denise Duhamel).

Writers will also have to opportunity to submit work during poetry and music events promoting the exhibition's run, which ends on April 26. (The show is held in conjunction with the new, monthlong, O, Miami literary festival, and information about all events is available on the festival Web site.) At the end of April, Abe's Penny will select one collaboration to publish as an issue of its magazine, which will be published piece-by-piece over the course of four weeks. 

Writers visiting the gallery are invited to pen their poetry in "utopian but functional" workspaces created by New World School students. In order to offer writers more time to interact with the photography, the gallery will open to poets one hour prior to each scheduled event. There is no fee to submit poems, and the events are free and open to the public.

Think of a piece of gossip you've heard and identify the least sympathetic person involved. Maybe it's the adulterous mother of two? Or the Salvation Army bell ringer who, during the holidays, pocketed some of the donations he'd collected? Write a story from the perspective of the least sympathetic person with the piece of gossip as the narrative climax. You might also try writing the story with the piece of gossip as the inciting action of the story, as the event that sets everything in motion.
This week's fiction prompt comes from Bret Anthony Johnston, fiction writer and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.

Choose a clichéd phrase ("fit as a fiddle," "think out of the box," "running on empty," etc.) and turn it around. Use the new meaning created by this reversal to fuel a poetic meditation.

The winner of the 2011 Story Prize, the annual twenty-thousand-dollar award for a collection of short fiction, was announced on Wednesday night. Idaho author Anthony Doerr received the honor for his fourth book and second story collection, Memory Wall (Scribner), a series of stories investigating memory and its relation to sense of self.

Judges John Freeman, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Marie du Vaure selected Doerr's book from a three-strong shortlist that also included Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House) and Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option (Norton). Li and Rivecca each received five thousand dollars.

Memory Wall also won the Pacific Northwest Literary Award and made recommended reading lists at the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Doerr has received numerous honors for his previous work, including two O. Henry Prizes, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.

Here's what critics had to say about Memory Wall.

"Doerr is daring, yes, and compassionate, but more than anything, the four stories and two novellas in this collection are imbued with, and fueled by, a deep, almost anachronistic-seeming respect for his twin muses: memory and the natural world." Jeff O'Keefe for the Rumpus

"The impetus of a Doerr story is always a movement toward transcendence, and the process is what matters, not the vehicles: not the metaphors, not the tricky plots, not the local color, not the occasional bursts of melodrama. It’s the flow of experience toward something resembling meaning, a sense of one’s place in time." Terrence Rafferty for the New York Times Book Review

"[Doerr] has a scientist's eye, a lyrical sensibility, and an impressively global canvas." Justine Jordan for the Guardian

In the video below, Doerr discusses books that blew his mind. 

[Correction: Story Prize winner Anthony Doerr received an award of twenty thousand dollars, not ten thousand dollars, as previously reported.]

Make a list of five physical artifacts that seem to lack emotional weight, the more mundane the better. A donut, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of socks, etc. From your list, choose one of the artifacts, and use it as the emotional linchpin of a story. Write a story in which, say, a vacuum cleaner takes on enormous and surprising emotional significance to a character. For an example of how this can work, read Ann Beattie's story "Janus" from her collection Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories (Scribner, 2002).
This week's fiction prompt comes from Bret Anthony Johnston, fiction writer and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.

The finalists for this year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which carries a prize of fifteen thousand dollars, were announced today. The shortlisted authors are Jennifer Egan for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Deborah Eisenberg for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Jaimy Gordon for her National Book Award-winning novel Lord of Misrule (McPherson); Eric Puchner for his novel Model Home (Scribner); and Brad Watson for his story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (Norton).

The titles were selected by authors Laura Furman, William Kittredge, and Helena Maria Viramontes from among 320 novels and short story collections published in 2010 by more than 125 publishers.

How does a judge manage to winnow all those entries? "There's a little sound a hardback book makes when it's first opened, not exactly a squeak but almost, and that sound became familiar," says Furman. "When I felt unsure, groggy, or worst, compromising, my fellow judges were there—as were the best of the books—to remind me to keep to the strictest of standards, those of my heart, instinct, and intelligence."

The winner of the thirty-first annual award will be announced during a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 7.

In the video below, Egan reads from her nominated book at New York City's Franklin Park Reading Series.

Flip through the dictionary and randomly choose ten words. Write a poem with each word in every other line.

The Yale University Library announced yesterday the winner of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar Bollingen Prize for a poet's lifetime contributions to the art.

The award goes to "fierce elegist" Susan Howe, author of works of poetry and lyric prose that weave together "history and mysticism, Puritan New England devotional writing and the Irish folk Ballad, visual lyricism and dramatic narrative, scholarship and memoir."

According to judges Peter Gizzi, Marjorie Perloff, and Claudia Rankine, Howe's most recent book, That This, published by New Directions in December, "makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the reclamation of historical documents." Howe wrote the book after the sudden death of her husband, scholar Peter H. Hare, in 2008.

Howe's oeuvre also includes the poetry collections Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), The Midnight (2003), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), all published by New Directions, and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is author of the prose volumes The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

The Bollingen Prize has been given biennially since 1948 to honor American poets. Past winners include John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich.