Poets & Writers Blogs

The New York Public Library has announced the five finalists for its twelfth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, given to an emerging writer for a work published in in the previous year. The winner of the honor, which carries a prize of ten thousand dollars, will be announced on May 14.

The 2012 finalists are Teju Cole for Open City (Random House), Benjamin Hale for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve), Ben Lerner for Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press), Karen Russell for Swamplandia! (Knopf), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury). Salvage the Bones, Ward's second novel after her breakout, Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Publishing, 2008), won the National Book Award in fiction last fall. Cole's debut was a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle Award.

Recent winners of the NYPL's top honor for emerging writers are Adam Levin for The Instructions (McSweeney's Books, 2010), Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and Salvatore Scibona for The End (Graywolf Press, 2008). The award is an program of the library's Young Lions, a group of donors in their twenties and thirties.

In the video below, finalist Teju Cole presents "a sneak peak" into his nascent nonfiction project at Franklin Park bar in Brooklyn, New York.

The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Among the winners was Edith Pearlman, whose fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), had also been nominated for the National Book Award last year, and went on to win the PEN/Malamud Award.

In poetry, Laura Kasischke won for her collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), which recently received the first Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. Mira Bartók won in autobiography for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press).

Awards were also given in criticism, to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press); in biography, to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); and in general nonfiction, to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).

Awards were also given to reviewer Kathryn Schulz, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books, who won this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

In the video below, Pearlman reads from her winning collection.

The Believer, the monthly whose mission, in part, is to "focus on writers and books we like," has named its finalists for the 2011 Believer Book Award for fiction. Of the five books selected by the magazine's editors as the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year," four are published by small, independent presses.

The shortlisted titles are Jesse Ball's third novel, The Curfew (Vintage), which the Believer's editors describe as "a tortuous snake of a story" that winds up resembling "an ouroboros swallowing its own tail"; Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (New Directions), a novel "preoccupied with the question of what genius looks like"; Lars Iyer's novel debut, Spurious (Melville House), whose pleasures are evocative of Beckett; Widow (Bellevue Literary Press), the first short story collection from novelist Michelle Latiolais, whose "narrators navigate familiar landscapes rendered nearly impassable by grief"; and Ben Lerner, who has previously published three poetry collections, for his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press).

The winner of the Believer Book Award will be announced in the May 2012 issue. Readers' nominations for best books of 2011 will appear alongside prize announcement.

In the video below, the Center for Fiction and n+1 magazine present a dramatic reading from DeWitt's shortlisted third novel (the second segment of the two-part reading is here).

Shenandoah, the literary journal published by Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has doubled the prize purse for its second annual short short story contest—which still has no entry fee. The Bevel Summers Prize, which received over two hundred submissions in its inaugural year, now offers a five-hundred-dollar award, and the winner will also see her miniature fiction published in Shenandoah.

The judge will be fiction writer Chris Galaver, an assistant professor at Washington and Lee. Galaver is the author of the novel-in-stories School for Tricksters, published last month by Southern Methodist University Press.

Writers may submit up to three stories of no more than one thousand words each by March 31. The winner will be announced in June. For complete guidelines, visit the magazine's prize page online.

Some details of the legacy late Polish poet Wisława Szymborska hoped to leave writers of the future were revealed yesterday at the opening of her will in Krakow. According to Michal Rusinek, Szymborska's personal secretary, the Nobel Prize-winning poet had called for the establishment of a foundation, among the tasks of which would be to facilitate the creation of a new literary prize.

The nature of the prize was not illustrated in Szymborska's will. The foundation, which will assume care of Szymborska's papers and possessions, will be responsible for determining the type of prize and to whom it might be given.

Szymborska, whose last collection, Here (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was published in the United States in 2010, died on the first of this month at the age of eighty-eight.

The video below is an animated adaptation of Szymborska's poem "Advertisement," translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanaugh.

Des Moines poet Jennifer Perrine has been a frequent feature in our Recent Winners pages over the past several years, due in no small part to the careful way she selects contests to enter and tracks presses' responses, and a willingness to dismantle and revise promising manuscripts until they transform into a perfect constellation. In 2008 her debut collection, The Body Is No Machine (New Issues, 2007), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. Her second book, In the Human Zoo, was published by University of Utah Press last May as part of another award, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Perrine's poems have also won competitions sponsored by the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, Third Coast, Bellingham Review, the Ledge, and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg. The poet shared with us recently what she looks for in an contest, the true value of awards, and what not to expect from a writing competition.

What has inspired you to submit your work for particular awards?
Right now I’m most interested in contests that offer something unusual—something other than, or in addition to, a monetary award. I’m at a point now where I have two books in print, and awards that involve travel and readings seem like a particularly effective way to share those books with a wider audience. I also love awards that include travel because they expose me to new communities and landscapes and let me test out my curiosity in a new place. That sort of exploration inevitably leads me to write more poems—or at least, different poems.

I also have a particular fondness for letterpress and book arts, so I seek out contests sponsored by book arts centers or ones that award publication of poems as broadsides. Entering contests can be expensive, and I like the idea that whether I win or not, I’m helping to support this beautiful intersection of poetry and visual art.

I used to submit work quite often to more standard contests—ones that award a monetary prize and publication—but I do so less and less. After some early years of scattering poems to the wind and crossing my fingers, I started limiting myself to sending only to journals and presses that regularly publish poetry that I find pleasurable or challenging. More recently, because I’ve been on a tight budget, I’ve only been sending poetry to contests if I receive something in exchange for the entry fee—a year’s subscription to the journal, perhaps, or a copy of the book that bested the other eight hundred manuscripts. Like travel, exposure to great new poetry changes me, and that’s what I’m out to find—transformative experiences, not just something that will look good on a CV.

How did you know your manuscripts were ready to go out?
With individual poems, I tend to work on each one obsessively until I can’t think of any other possibilities to explore in the work. Then I send it out. I try to send it out at the point where I’m most excited about it; if I let poems sit too long while I move on to another project, I’ll start to gaze back on those older poems with hesitation or doubt. I’d rather put a poem into the world while I’m still surprised by what I’ve written, with the hope that some of that surprise will cling to the poem and reach the reader.

With book-length manuscripts, I take all my poems, spread them across the floor, and arrange them in various ways—removing some, inserting others—until I finally find some order that holds together as a book. I’m not necessarily looking for a theme, but usually patterns will emerge—recurring images, resonances between poems that were written months or years apart—that make the manuscript into something greater than the sum of its parts. I’ll submit a manuscript to several presses, note where it places as a finalist, and the next year I’ll repeat the process all over again, disassembling and rebuilding the manuscript until it finds its final incarnation—the one that a press turns into a book and sends out into the world. With each version of the manuscript, though, I always believe that those poems, ordered in that particular sequence, speak to each other in a way that creates constellations that are more illuminating when taken together and that aren’t dependent on a handful of standout stars.

Are you also submitting to publishers outside of competitions?
I submit individual poems outside of competitions all the time. I’ve also sent book-length manuscripts during the open reading periods to a couple of presses—Graywolf Press and Four Way Books—that I really love and that consistently publish great books.

It seems that many contests are geared toward publication of first or second books, so I’m sure I’ll be working out a new approach when I submit my next manuscript; I’ll inevitably be sending my work to more presses outside of competitions. That seems appropriate, though, because at this point in my writing life, I’m looking more for a press that wants to publish my work over the long haul than for the recognition a single prize confers.

Is there one prize that has been of particular value to you?
Really? You’re going to make me choose?

Again, the opportunity for travel is really important to me, so I’ve particularly appreciated the Mérida Fellowship Award from U.S. Poets in Mexico, during which I learned so much from fellow poets and from the people who live in and around Mérida; the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, which opened me to the natural wonders of Point Lobos, Big Sur, and Carmel-by-the-Sea, as well as the stone-cold beauty of Tor House; the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, which was especially delightful because I got to meet the students who juried the competition, so I knew that there were young writers reading my book and finding something worthwhile there; and the Writers at Work Fellowship, during which I spent every day awestruck by the mountains around Salt Lake City and worked every night on assembling the initial version of my first manuscript.

Other awards have meant a great deal to me for other reasons. Early awards from Gertrude, the Connecticut Poetry Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center came just after I had returned to college after dropping out for a couple of years. Those awards gave me some sense that I had made the right choice when I decided to spend more time reading and writing poetry, and less time selling donuts and CDs. At the other end of the spectrum, winning the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize was wonderful—it was such a relief to find a home for my second book and to know that my poetic muscles hadn’t atrophied after I finished graduate school and started teaching full-time. I know it sounds like a copout, but I value every award I’ve received because each one is a reminder that someone out there is reading my work with care and enthusiasm. I write through, about, and around events and ideas that are important to me; the gratification doesn’t come from the award itself, but from knowing that another human being values the same things I do. Each award reestablishes my connection to the reader, which I can sometimes forget when toiling away on a poem by myself.

What piece of advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
Decide what drives you to submit to contests. If you’re entering contests for affirmation or money, there are easier ways to earn both. Contests also aren’t the easiest way to get your work into the world; if you just want to get your work out there, you can start a blog, and you can self-publish your manuscript. If, on the other hand, you want to support journals and presses you love, submit work to them. If you have a strong desire to travel or to find a community of other poets, submit to contests that will lead you down that path.

Keep a tight rein on your ego and your envy. Be happy for your friends who win prizes, even—no, especially—if you were competing for the same award. Be gracious, and remember that you’re doing this for the love of poetry, not to be a superstar. If I’m wrong, and you do want to be a superstar, try out for a reality TV show—you’ll have a much larger audience.

Be organized. Make life easier on the contest readers—who are usually your fellow poets—by keeping track of your submissions, so you can notify them if you need to withdraw a piece.

Let your rejections feed your work. Use them as a reminder to keep writing, to keep revising, to keep sending more work out, knowing that one day your poetry will kindle a sense of connection in a reader, someone who will see your poems as kin and give them a home.

Whatever you do, don’t give up. Whatever you do, enjoy the work.