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Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
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Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.
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We've all seen movie trailers and book trailers, but here's a new one: a trailer for an undergraduate lecture course that was offered last fall at the University of Michigan. "Comparative Literature 382: Literature and the Other Arts: Dividing Time: Art House Animation and Poetics" used animated films, poems, short stories, aesthetic theory, and film criticism to examine "how the timing, technique, technology, attention to audience, and intertextual relations of a given work condition our experience of it."
Quiddity, a literary journal out of Benedictine University in Springfield, Illinois, has launched its inaugural contest for a prose book trailer. The biennial competition is open to short films based on both unpublished manuscripts and published books of fiction or creative nonfiction, offering a five-hundred-dollar prize in each category.
Aside from the cash prize, Quiddity will also arrange to promote the winning trailers in the journal and on National Public Radio member station WUIS Springfield, as well as on the Web sites of both. The journal's prose editor David Logan and emerging novelist A. D. Carson will judge.
Authors should submit films of no longer than three minutes in the
manuscript category, and publishers or presses should submit entries for
published books; entry is free. Complete guidelines and entry forms are available on the Quiddity website.
Entries aren't due until December 10, but a look at Carson's sample trailer below might leave some writers wanting to carve out substantial time to get production just right, or assemble a crew—friends and colleagues are permitted to assist in the trailer's creation. Videos simply featuring authors reading do not qualify for this competition.
For Allison Amend, author of the story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West, the road to publication has been a slightly bumpy one. It has required tenacity and perseverance, coupled with faith in her considerable talent. An Iowa MFA grad, with several prestigious credits, and for at least ten years, no books—she diligently wrote, placed articles and stories, applied for residencies and fellowships, freelanced, taught freshman comp, while her peers openly debated why Allison Amend had not yet published a book. She'd been a finalist or semi-finalist in so many first book award contests she'd stopped listing them on her resume.
In 2004, she finished a historical novel, Stations West. A version of the first chapter had appeared in One Story in 2002. And she landed a big-time agent, who shopped the book to over thirty publishing houses, at first big, and then small. Many editors liked it; some came tantalizingly close to saying yes, but ultimately none offered to publish it. Amend’s agent suggested she put her hard-wrought novel, as they say, in the drawer. Subsequently, she and the agent parted ways. But Amend persisted on her own, finally finding a publisher for her book, despite having no representation. The novel was published in 2010, to critical acclaim, and nominated for the $100,000 Sami Rohr prize. She's now represented by Terra Chalberg at the Susan Golomb Literary Agency. (Terra Chalberg answers reader-submitted questions in The Poets & Writers Guide to Literary Agents.)
Of all authors, Amend knows the pros and cons of working with an agent. In this video, she shares her experience.
Write a scene in which two characters who are close (friends, relatives, a couple) are secretly angry at each other about something that has happened in the past. Decide what they are angry about before writing the scene but don't write about it directly. Instead, reveal the tension between them in the dialogue and in the actions involved in accomplishing a mundane task they are doing together, such as moving a couch, setting up a tent, making dinner, or painting a house.
The winner has been announced for the fourth biennial Man Booker International Prize, which carries a purse of sixty thousand pounds. For American Philip Roth, who was honored for his lifetime contributions to fiction, that translates to roughly ninety-seven thousand dollars.
Roth's oeuvre—from Goodbye, Columbus (Houghton Mifflin, 1959) to Nemesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)—has "stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience," said chair of judges Rick Gekoski. "His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally."
A three-time finalist for the international award, Roth was joined on this year's shortlist by U.K. authors John le Carré (whose request to be removed from the shortlist was unsuccessful) and Philip Pullman, Australian David Malouf, Chinese author Su Tong, and Americans Marilynne Robinson and Anne Tyler. Past winners of the prize include Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Ismail Kadare of Albania, and Alice Munro of Canada.
In the video below, Roth talks about beginning a novel and the years-long process of working on one, and why he doesn't worry about the reader.
The 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference was held from June 6 to June 12 and from June 13 to June 19 at the Vineyard Arts Project (VAP) campus in downtown Edgartown on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The conference featured weeklong seminars with daily workshops in poetry and fiction, as well as manuscript consultations, panel discussions, and readings. The faculty included poets Amelia Martens, Adrian Matejka, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Britton Shurley, and Keith Taylor; and fiction writers Tia Clark, John T.
Type:
CONFERENCE
Ignore Event Date Field?:
yes
Event Date:
March 24, 2026
Rolling Admissions:
ignore
Application Deadline:
March 24, 2026
Financial Aid?:
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline:
March 24, 2026
Free Admission:
no
Contact Information:
Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference, 7 East Pasture Road, Aquinnah, MA 02535. (954) 242-2903. Alexander Weinstein, Director.
Adapted from the 1891 novella by Anton Chekhov, The Duel, starring Andrew Scott as Laevsky and Fiona Glascott as Nadya, was released last April to rave reviews. Widely considered a successful literary adaptation (no small feat), the movie will be available on DVD later this month.
Blackbird, the online literary magazine of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, has announced a new award for short fiction.
Given in honor of late Richmond-born fiction writer Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto, a two-thousand-dollar prize will be given annually for a story submitted to the journal over the course of each year, specifically by an emerging writer.
The inaugural winner, selected from among writers published in Blackbird this year, will be announced in the Fall 2011 issue. In addition to the monetary prize, the winner will be invited to give a reading on the VCU campus next spring, and may also be asked to put in appearances at Richmond-area elementary and high schools.
Blackbird does not charge a fee for submissions, and prefers writers to send work using the magazine's electronic form. For details on how to submit, visit theBlackbird website.
For fans of mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer comes The Meowmorphosis by Frank Kafka and Coleridge Cook, published this week by Quirk Books.
Choose a bureaucracy: the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Post Office, the Army,etc. Imagine two people who work there, one a supervisor, the other an underling, and write their letters of resignation. Then write a scene where the two former co-workers meet for coffee three years later.
