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.

St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, announced the shortlist for its new fifty-thousand-dollar literary award, given to honor a fourth book of fiction. The finalists are Chris Abani for his novella Song For Night (Akashic Books, 2007), Aleksandar Hemon for his short story collection Love and Obstacles (Riverhead Books, 2009), Jim Krusoe for his novel Girl Factory (Tin House Books, 2008), and Arthur Phillips for his novel The Song Is You (Random House, 2009).

The judges for the award are authors Michael Chabon, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, and Ayelet Waldman. They selected the four finalists from a pool of just under forty submissions.

The winner will be announced on September 12 at a gala celebrating the Brooklyn Book Festival, which will be held the following day at Brooklyn Borough Hall, a few blocks from the St. Francis campus. A ceremony to honor the prize recipient, who will conduct a fiction workshop and give a reading at St. Francis, will be held at the college in the fall.

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.