Poets & Writers Blogs

The University of Iowa Press announced today the winners of the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize, both of them receiving the honor for debut collections. The prize, which is given annually to both emerging and established writers, went to Samuel Amadon for Like a Sea and Molly Brodak for A Little Middle of the Night. Their books will be published by the press next March, and each writer will receive a standard royalty contract.

Amadon is the author of the chapbooks Advice for Young Couples from H_NGM_N B_ _KS, Goodnight Lung from Octopus Books, Each H from Ugly Duckling Presse, and Spy Poem, released by Projective Industries, the chapbook press where he serves as coeditor. He received his MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, where he teaches as a graduate fellow. "Rather than create worlds," University of Iowa Press said of Amadon's poems in the awards announcement, "they point out what a strange world already exists."

Brodak, whose Instructions for a Painting was selected by Reginald Shepherd for the 2007 GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series, received her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University and teaches at Augusta State University. The press noted that her collection "simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself."

The next deadline for the prize is April 30, 2010.

Due to the popularity of the first Three-Minute Fiction Contest, National Public Radio (NPR) is giving writers a second chance to submit their short short stories. This round of the contest, judged once again by writer and critic James Wood, asks writers to begin their pieces with the line "The nurse left work at five o'clock."

Stories must be no longer than six hundred words, and may be submitted via an e-mail form on the NPR Web site. The contest closes tonight at 11:59 PM. Favorite stories will be posted on the site, and the winning tale will be read by Wood on air.

Molly Reid, who teaches composition and literature at Colorado State University, won the inaugural contest earlier this summer for her story "Not That I Care," selected from over five thousand submissions. Along with Reid's winning work, the finalists' pieces can be viewed online at NPR's Three-Minute Fiction series page.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday that it has awarded sixteen translators Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects to work on specific literary endeavors. Six fellows were awarded grants of $25,000, and ten will receive $12,500 to work on English translations of works in Croatian, Turkish, and Catalan, among other languages.

The fellowships for poetry went to Olga Broumas to support translations from the Greek of works by contemporary poet Kiki Dimoula, author of twelve volumes of verse; Eléna Rivera for a translation from the French of Bernard Noël’s collection The Rest of the Voyage; Richard Tillinghast for a translation from the Turkish of selected pieces by experimental poet Edip Cansever; and Russell Valentino for a translation from the Rovignese, a rare Istro-Venetian dialect, of Conversations with Filip the Seagull in this Corner of Paradise by Ligio Zanini, who died in 1993. Each translator will receive $12,500.

Fellows in fiction are Charlotte Mandell, who will be working on a translation from the French of the five-hundred-page, single-sentence novel Zone by Mathias Énard, published in 2008; Daniel Shapiro for a translation from the Spanish of the short story collection Missing Persons, Animals and Artists by contemporary Mexican writer Roberto Ransom; and Martha Tennent for a translation from the Catalan of approximately forty stories from the lesser-known collections of Mercè Rodoreda. They each will receive $25,000.

Also given $12,500 awards in fiction were Ellen Elias-Bursac for a translation from the Croatian of the novel The Goldsmith's Gold by August Šenoa; Tina Kover for a translation from the French of Manette Salomon by brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who wrote in the mid- to late-nineteenth century; and Tess Lewis for a translation from the German of Alois Hotschnig’s short story collection Die Kinder Beruhigte das Nicht (That Didn't Reassure the Children), published in Germany in 2006.

The nonfiction fellows are Brian Henry for a translation from the Slovenian of Ales Steger’s essay collection, Berlin; and Sandra Kingery for her translation from the Spanish of the memoir We Won the War by Esther Tusquets. Henry received $25,000 and Kingery received $12,500.

Eugene Ostashevsky received a $12,500 award for a translation from the Russian of a the philosopher Leonid Lipavsky’s Conversations, a portrayal of his talks with the OBERIU, a group of Russian avant-garde poets. Three playwrights, Diane Arnson Svarlien, Chantal Bilodeau, and Nahma Sandrow also received fellowships.

The fellowships, given annually by the NEA, have supported such projects as Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction last year. The next application deadline is January 7, 2010.

Two of this year’s fellows, Lewis and Shapiro, also recently received three-thousand-dollar Translation Fund Grants from PEN American Center to support the translations mentioned above.

A prize of one thousand dollars and publication in Bear Deluxe Magazine out of Portland, Oregon, is being offered for a short story that addresses the environment, sense of place, and the natural world. The magazine is published by Orlo, a nonprofit that supports creative arts that explore environmental issues.

The judge for this year’s prize will be Portland writer Jon Raymond, whose most recent book is the story collection Livability (Bloomsbury, 2009), two pieces from which have been adapted for film. The 2006 film Old Joy was based on the story of the same title, and "Train Choir" became the 2008 movie Wendy and Lucy. Raymond has also written and edited for locally-based literary magazine Tin House.

Writers may submit stories of up to 5,000 words by September 8. The contest charges a $15 entry fee, which includes a copy of the prize issue.

Last year’s winner, Justin Blessinger of Madison, South Dakota, had his story "Winter Count" published in the Summer 2009 issue of the magazine. The judge was Katherine Dunn, also a Portland resident and the author of Geek Love (Knopf, 1989).

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has awarded Deb Olin Unferth the Cabell First Novelist Award for Vacation, published by McSweeney’s Books in 2008. She will receive five thousand dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip to Richmond to attend VCU’s First Novelist Festival in November.

Unferth has previously published a short story collection, Minor Robberies, one-third of the boxed set One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box (McSweeney's Books, 2007), which also includes How the Water Feels to the Fishes by Dave Eggers and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape by Sarah Manguso.

Unferth’s debut novel was selected for the honor by previous prizewinners Travis Holland and Peter Orner, and Andrew Blossom, the editor of Makeout Creek magazine and the anthology Richmond Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books in March 2010. Holland won the 2008 award for The Archivist’s Story (Dial Press, 2007), and Orner won in 2007 for The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006).

This year's finalists were David Mura for Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (Coffee House Press) and Jesmyn Ward for Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Bolden), recently nominated for a Legacy Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

The annual award is named for prolific Richmond author and poet James Branch Cabell, known for his contributions to fantasy fiction, though he also wrote literary works. His debut novel, The Eagle’s Shadow—the first of fifty-two volumes of work—was published by Doubleday in 1904.

The next deadline for publishers to submit nominations is September 15, for books published in January through June of this year. The entry deadline for books released in July through December is January 15, 2010.

Travel Web site Trazzler and NYCgo, a New York City lifestyle site, are currently running a travel writing competition for a short-short essay on a personal oasis. One writer will win ten thousand dollars and a two-week trip to New York City to write about oases in the urban landscape for Trazzler. Four runners-up will receive five-hundred-dollar contracts to cover fifteen excursions. The deadline for 160-word entries, accepted online only, is August 17.

"Modern life can often feel like a trek through the desert," Trazzler says in its contest guidelines. "We want you to write about a place that not only satisfies your thirst for a change of scenery, but goes beyond this, breaking the spell of everyday existence and providing the ‘refuge, relief, or pleasant contrast’ that we all crave, especially in the summer." 

According to the guidelines, writers may have to employ some self-promotion to make it through the three-tiered selection process. Semifinalists’ pieces, chosen by editors and posted on Trazzler, will be voted on by the public. For writers among the semifinalists, Trazzler recommends publicizing the mini-essays using Twitter, social networking sites, and blogs. An editorial jury will then select the winner from the ten most popular pieces, and the prize announcement will be made during the week of September 21.

In order to enter, writers must sign up to be members of Trazzler using their Facebook accounts. A note to residents of Arizona: according to the official rules, this contest is void in the state.

DIAGRAM, an online magazine of text and art, has announced the winner of its 2009 Chapbook Contest, which was open to manuscripts of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and mixed-genre writing. Benjamin Mirov, a poet and editor of the online journal Pax Americana from New York City, won for his collection I Is to Vorticism. Mirov’s Ghost Machine was also a finalist for the one-thousand-dollar award, which includes publication by New Michigan Press.

The finalists are:
Lucy Anderton for The Sinister Juice (poetry)
Douglas Basford for Gull Hymns (poetry)
Franklin Bruno for All That Is Solid Melts in Your Mouth (poetry)
William Carty for Quarry (poetry)
Justin Dodd for An Extravagant Fever (poetry)
Patrick Ryan Frank for A Compact Guide to Modern Fears (poetry)
Loren Goodman for New Products (poetry)
Boris Jardine for Resistance (poetry)
Heather Kirn for Psalms of Unknowing (poetry)
Sara Levine for Misgivings (fiction)
JoAnna Novak for Something Real (fiction)
J. Robinson, for Strap On Aesthete (mixed genre)
Jennifer Tamayo for Keloid (mixed genre)
Mark Yakich for Pornocracies (poetry)
Jake Adam York for The Lamps Are Never Out (poetry)

The majority of entries fell into the category of poetry—ninety-five percent, according to DIAGRAM editor Ander Monson’s estimation—but the journal hopes to see more prose and multigenre chapbook submissions in the future, Monson said. The next deadline for the contest is April 30, 2010.

The journal is currently running its annual Hybrid Essay Contest for pieces that incorporate innovative textual and visual elements or writing in genres besides creative nonfiction. The winning work will be published in DIAGRAM and the writer or writers—essays by multiple authors are accepted—will receive one thousand dollars. Finalists’ pieces will also be considered for publication.

So what kind of work is the journal seeking? "We still don't know exactly what we mean by hybrid, and we would certainly prefer to leave definitions up to you. We don't like them," say the submission guidelines on the journal’s Web site. "We're looking for essays that are in some way outside the traditional boundaries of the genre. The lyric essay is a great example of a hybrid form: an essay that is essay but also poem. So we're looking for fusion of one sort or another. In particular we'd like to see work with greater visual components, or perhaps audio, or something that will amaze and beguile us."

Hybrid writers can submit essays of ten thousand words or fewer with a fifteen dollar entry fee, either using DIAGRAM’s electronic submission system or via mail, by October 31. Ander Monson and Nicole Walker will judge.