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With National Poetry Month officially wrapped up, Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network has declared May “Short Story Month.” He plans to select three stories—one from a published collection, one from a print periodical, and one from an online journal—to read and blog about each day. If all goes well, Wickett will have covered just shy of one hundred pieces by month’s end.
Creative writers stand at the edge of a digital divide. On one side: the traditions of paper. On the other: the lure of the Internet. As glossy magazines die by the dozen and blogs become increasingly influential, we face the reality that print venues are rapidly ceding ground to Web-based publishing. Yet many of us still hesitate to make the leap.
Many in the publishing industry now consider Twitter—as they do Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—an essential marketing venue for books and authors. But authors hoping to tweet their way to the social-networking top need more than a Twitter account—they need a game plan.
National Poetry Month is almost over. We laughed; we cried; we read and, perhaps, wrote some good poems. But now that the month-long verse extravaganza is nearly at an end—although it never really ends for the poets out there, does it—attention turns to the other genres as well. So, perhaps it's time to point out that fiction writers have a number of opportunities during May to enter contests in which prizes are given for short stories.
For the procrastinators out there, tomorrow is the deadline for three contests, all of which offer a thousand dollars and publication. The Journal's Short Story Contest is given for a single short story, Lee K. Abbott will judge; Leapfrog Press's Fiction Award is given for an entire manuscript of stories (or a novel or novella) and will be judged by three Michaels (Michael Graziano, Michael Lee, and Michael Mirolla), and the Southwest Review's David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction is given for a single story and is open only to writers who have yet to publish a book.
For those who want to plan a bit further ahead, the deadline for Hunger Mountain's Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize is May 10. The author of the winning story receives a thousand dollars and publication.
May 15 is the deadline for the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, the well-defined prize given annually for a story writer whose fiction hasn't appeared in a nationally distributed publication with a circulation of five thousand or more.
And even though it falls on a Sunday, May 31 is the deadline for three short story-related contests: the University of Georgia Press's Flannery O'Connor Awards, Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and The Writer's Short Story Contest.
American poet Craig Arnold, author of the poetry collections Shells (Yale University Press, 1999) and Made Flesh (Ausable Press, 2008), went missing in Kuchino-erabu, a small island in Southern Japan, on April 27.
Need a dose of inspiration for your writing routine this April? Take our Poetry Challenge and try out a new writing prompt or poetry-related assignment every day during National Poetry Month.
A New York City judge approved on Tuesday a four-month extension of the deadline for authors to agree or object to a settlement with Google Inc. over its massive book-scanning venture.
Timothy Donnelly, poetry editor of the Boston Review, received nearly nine hundred submissions for this year's "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Contest, coordinated in partnership with the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. From that tower of manuscripts, judges Mary Jo Bang, Terrance Hayes, and Mark Strand recently chose four winners. They are Jynne Dilling Martin, Bridget Lowe, Jeffrey Schultz, and Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo.
The "Discovery" contest has been around for five decades, but this is only the second year that the Boston Review has had a hand in coordinating the prizes and publishing the winners. Previously that honor went to the Nation, which ended its partnership in 2007. The annual prize is given for a group of poems by a poet who has not yet published a book—emphasis on the yet. After all, two of the judges, Bang and Strand, are previous winners of the contest and went on to collect a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize, respectively.
The editors of the Boston Review said the judges cited "formal invention, uniqueness of voice, and clarity of vision as distinguishing characteristics" of the four winners. In addition to the five-hundred-dollar cash prize and publication of their poems in the Boston Review, they have been invited read at the 92nd Street Y on May 11.
Martin, who is also the Random House publicist for such authors as Charles Bock, Emily Chenoweth, and Curtis Sittenfeld, has had her poems published in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere.
Lowe is completing her MFA at Syracuse University, where she has received the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and the Peter Neagoe Fiction Award.
Schultz teaches at Pepperdine University and has had his poems published in Great River Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.
And Yoo is a New York City poet whose work has appeared in LIT, Chelsea, jubilat, and Western Humanities Review.
A couple months ago we told you about the establishment of a one-time-only contest for the best creative writing on the subject of president Barack Obama. Don Williams, the editor of the annual literary magazine New Millennium Writings offered a thousand dollars for the poem, story, or essay that effectively marks "this moment in our still-young millennium." Yesterday he announced a winner: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky of Pleasant Hill, California, for her poem "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On." According to Williams, Lowinsky's poem "imagines the spirit of Barack Obama's deceased grandmother gracing proceedings the night of his election."
Three other writers received additional hundred-dollar prizes: Suellen Wedmore of Rockport, Massachusetts, for her poem, "Because," a lyrical catalogue of events and forces that contributed to Obama's victory; Sarah Miller of Somerville, Massachusetts, for her essay "By Contrast," which compared the previous administration to a New England winter; and Frances Payne Adler of Portland, Oregon, for "In the White House," a joyful imagining of the first hours of occupancy of the White House by the Obama family. All four winning pieces will appear in the next issue of New Millennium Writings, which is due out in November.
In addition, twenty submissions were chosen for honorable mention. The authors are Veda M. Ball of Boulder, Colorado; Craig Barnes of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tricia Coscia, Morrisville, Pennsylvania; Deborah Cooper of Duluth, Minnesota; Darlene Dauphin of Missouri City, Texas; Terry Ehret of Petaluma, California; Paula Friedman of Parkdale, Oregon; N. R. Gair of Newton, Massachusetts; Darryl Halbrooks of Richmond, Kentucky; Maryanne Hannan of Delmar, New York; F. Gerald Jefferson of Cleveland, Tennessee; Langston Kerman of Ann Arbor, Michigan; Ann Killough of Brookline, Massachusetts; Andrew Lam of San Francisco, California; Herbert Lowrey of Washington, DC; Barbara March of Cedarville, California; SheLa Morrison of Gabriola Island, BC; Garrett Rowlan of Los Angeles; Jesse Tangen-Mills of Bogota, Columbia; and Diana Whitney of Brattleboro, Vermont.
"Judging these awards was a privilege," Williams wrote in an e-mail. "Competition was stiff. We appreciate all who contributed to the success of this contest."
Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, the free e-book application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, yesterday announced that it had been acquired by Amazon. Neither company disclosed financial details. "We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition, representatives from Lexcycle wrote on the company's blog. "Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read e-books from our many content partners."
