Shenandoah, the literary review of Washington and Lee University in Virginia, announced today that Aaron Baker of Charlottesville, Virginia, has been selected as winner of the 2009 Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. The $2,500 prize honors his first poetry collection, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), winner of the 2007 Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize judge Alice Friman says that the book, evocative of Baker’s experiences as a child of missionaries in Papua New Guinea, illuminates "the essential mystery that underlies all things."

Prior to the release of his collection, Baker received his MFA from University of Virginia and spent time as a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University. He teaches at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

The Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize, given for a debut book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction, will be given again in 2010 for a collection of stories. The deadline to submit a published book and an unpublished new story—the winning author’s piece will be published in Shenandoah—is March 31, 2010. Next year’s prize is two thousand dollars.

Past Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize winners are:

2008
Margot Singer in fiction for The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), selected by Cathryn Hankla

2007
Emily Rosko in poetry for Raw Goods Inventory (University of Iowa Press, 2006), selected by Sarah Kennedy

2006
Bret Anthony Johnston in fiction for Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004), selected by Donald Secreast

2005
Rebecca McClanahan in creative nonfiction for The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), selected by Jeffrey Hammond

2004
Catherine Barnett in poetry for Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004), selected by Robert Wrigley

2003
Ann Pancake in fiction for Given Ground (University Press of New England, 2001), selected by David Jauss

2002
Christopher Cokinos in creative nonfiction for Hope Is a Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), selected by Kim Barnes

2001
Talvikki Ansel in Poetry for My Shining Archipelago (Yale University Press, 1997), selected by R. T. Smith

Esquire is doing it, and now fellow Hearst magazine Good Housekeeping has announced that it will be running a short story competition in the coming months. The prize is three thousand dollars and publication next May in the 124-year-old women’s journal that has published the work of writers including John Cheever, Somerset Maugham, Edwin Markham, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.

The contest judge will be Jodi Picoult, best-selling author of—according to the tagline of her Web site—"novels about family, relationships, and love" such as My Sister’s Keeper (Atria Books, 2004) and Handle With Care (Atria Books, 2009).

Until September 15, U.S. writers can submit stories of no more than 3,500 words via e-mail. The magazine isn’t charging a fee for entries, but it is limiting submissions to one story per writer.

Two runners-up prizes of $750 each and publication on the Good Housekeeping Web site will also be given. The winners will be announced in mid-December.

Memoir (and), a biannual journal dedicated to creative nonfiction that challenges the boundaries of the form, is winding down its summer contest for memoir in poetry and prose. Writers working in any genre can submit their true stories until August 15 for an opportunity to win a prize of five hundred dollars and publication in the magazine.

A second-place prize of two hundred and fifty dollars and a third-place award of a hundred dollars will also be given. There’s no entry fee, and all submissions will be considered for publication.

So what does the journal consider memoir? According to the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Memoir (and) Web site, it's “any creative work that is not fictional and that observes or describes, in one way or another, the author’s personal experience. In form, it can be prose, epistolary, experimental, poetry, narrative photography, graphic, and so on.”

“When we first considered publishing a journal focused on memoir," founding editor Candida Lawrence says, "we were confident that we knew one when we read one, heard one, wrote one,” but adds that set parameters seemed elusive.

For those storytellers with visual arts inclinations, the journal is also offering a hundred-dollar prize for a graphic memoir. The deadline for that prize is also August 15.

Writers who are residents of Arizona, California, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have the opportunity this summer to apply for awards specific to the states they call home.

Deadlines for grants from five states arts councils are coming up, offering awards that range from one thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars. Some funds are for specific projects, but others are no-strings grants.

Here is a list of upcoming deadlines for grants sponsored by state arts organizations:

July 31
Maryland State Arts Council (for fiction writers only)
Individual Artist Awards

August 1
Delaware Division of the Arts
Individual Artist Fellowships

September 1
Illinois Arts Council (for fiction and creative nonfiction writers only)
Artist Fellowship Awards

Ohio Arts Council
Individual Excellence Awards

September 3
Arizona Commission on the Arts
Artist Project Grants

Also this summer, California poets and fiction writers are invited to apply to the Writers Exchange Contest sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. The award is five hundred dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City to meet with a wish list of writers, editors, and agents. The deadline is August 31.

Until September 1, women writers from Philadelphia can apply for the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grants of up to $2,500 to fund a project that melds art and social progress.

Stay tuned later this summer for deadlines in October and November for New York, South Carolina, and Wyoming writers.