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PEN American Center, the U.S. branch of the international literary and human rights group, announced yesterday that it has been awarded a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant by Amazon. The money will support PEN’s Freedom to Write Program, which advocates on behalf of imprisoned or persecuted writers worldwide, as well as its Campaign for Core Freedoms, which opposes censorship in the United States.
In honor of the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, an eponymous competition is underway to celebrate a poem by a student attending a school of osteopathy or medical studies in the United States or Canada. The contest, now in its twenty-eighth year, awards a three-hundred-dollar prize sponsored by the Behavioral and Community Health Sciences Department of the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy (NEOUCOM).
A second-place prize of two hundred dollars and a third-place prize of one hundred dollars will also be given, and the three winners will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to read their poems at NEOUCOM on April 23, 2010. In addition, the editors of Journal of Medical Humanities will consider the winning works for publication.
The final judge will be psychiatrist and poet Richard M. Berlin, who received the 2002 Pearl Poetry Prize for his collection How JFK Killed My Father (Pearl Editions, 2003). English faculty of the Northeastern Ohio Universities consortium will act as preliminary judges.
December 31 is the deadline for writers pursuing an M.D. or D.O. degree to submit up to three poems of no more than 750 words each (enclose five copies of each poem). There is no fee to enter. Complete details can be found on the prize guidelines document online.
Online writing community Protagonize—a platform for collaborative, interactive fiction—announced last week that it will begin implementing an optional subscription system. While core services will remain free, paid accounts are set to include, among other features, ad-free browsing, personal blogs, and reader statistics.
Chautauqua, the journal of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, is seeking entries for its annual contest, open each year to writers working in different genres. This year's competition is open to fiction writers whose stories touch on the "broadly conceived" theme of music and words. The winner will receive a prize of one thousand dollars and publication in the journal.
The judge will be David Crouse, short story writer and "fringe art" enthusiast—among Crouse's interests, according to the journal, are "punk rock, 'outsider' music, neo-psychedlia, found art, Italian zombie movies, and other odd cultural artifacts." His stories have been collected in two books, Copy Cats, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from University of Georgia Press, and The Man Back There, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, and published in journals such as the Greensboro Review and Quarterly West. Crouse's comic book writing has also appeared in the anthology The Dark Horse Book of the Dead (Dark Horse Comics, 2005).
Chautauqua is accepting story entries of up to five thousand words, sent along with a twenty dollar entry fee, until November 15.
After more than four decades in business, one of Britain’s most intrepid independent publishers is closing its doors. Marion Boyars, which counts Georges Bataille, Ken Kesey, Hubert Selby Jr., and Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe among its authors, announced yesterday that it will begin winding down operations after the release of its fall catalogue.
Marick Press, the publisher of poets such as Franz Wright, G. C. Waldrep, and Katie Ford, has launched a new poetry book contest. Accepting entries now, the competition is open to manuscripts of forty-eight to eighty pages until October 15.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose chapbook At the Revelation Restaurant and Other Poems was published by Marick Press this year, will judge the inaugural prize. The winner, announced on March 15, 2010, will receive one thousand dollars and publication of his or her collection by the nonprofit press.
Ostriker is the author of twelve poetry collections, including the forthcoming work The Book of Seventy, which will be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in October. Her previous books include The Mother/Child Papers (Momentum Press, 1980), the volcano sequence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), and No Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Ostriker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches at the low-residency program at Drew University.
The first book and only novel by memoirist Augusten Burroughs is coming to television. Screenwriter Bryan Fuller (Heroes) and director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) are partnering to adapt Sellevision (St. Martin’s, 2000), which focuses on four characters linked by a fictional home shopping channel, as an hour-long comedy-drama series for NBC.
The National Poetry Series announced yesterday the five winners of the 2009 Open Competition. The prize, established in 1978, is given annually to "ensure the publication of five books of poetry a year" through trade, university, and small press publishers, with winning manuscripts selected by established poets.
This year's winners are:
Julie Carr of Denver for Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, selected by Eileen Myles and to be published by Coffee House Press
Colin Cheney of New York City for Here Be Monsters, selected by David Wojahn, and to be published by University of Georgia Press
Carrie Fountain of Austin, Texas, for Burn Lake, selected by Natasha Trethewey and to be published by Penguin Books
Erika Meitner of Blacksburg, Virginia, for Ideal Cities, selected by Paul Guest and to be published by HarperCollins
Jena Osman of Philadelphia for The Network, selected by Prageeta Sharma, and to be published by Fence Books
Each winner received one thousand dollars, and their winning books will be published during the summer of 2010.
More than six weeks after it remotely erased unlicensed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from an undisclosed number of Kindle devices, Amazon is still trying to make amends. Last Thursday the company sent an e-mail to affected customers offering to either replace the deleted e-books or provide restitution in the form of a gift certificate or check for thirty dollars.
The Man Booker Prize judges announced today the finalists for the 2009 award, selected from a longlist of thirteen. Six writers now have less than a month to wait to see who of them will receive the fifty-thousand-pound prize (a little over eighty thousand dollars), given for a novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
The shortlisted titles are:
The Children's Book (Chatto and Windus) by A. S. Byatt
Summertime (Harvill Secker) by J. M. Coetzee
The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape) by Adam Fould
Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) by Hilary Mantel
The Glass Room (Little, Brown) by Simon Mawer
The Little Stranger (Virago) by Sarah Waters
For readers interested in sampling the selected texts, audio excerpts from the finalists' books, as well as interviews with the writers, are available on the prize Web site. The site is also hosting a virtual debate about the shortlisted books.
This year's judges are critic Lucasta Miller, journalist John Mullan, broadcaster James Naughtie, comedian Sue Perkins, and Sunday Telegraph literary editor Michael Prodger. They will reveal the winner on October 6.
